Graded English Reader
Ortiz Ullery
A graded reader book is an "easy reading" book that supports the extensive reading approach to teaching English as a second or foreign language, and other languages. While many graded reader books are written for native speaker children, more often they are targeted at young adults and above, since children's books are already widely available and deal with topics not relevant to more mature language learners.
Graded readers can be adapted from literary classics, films, biographies, travel books, etc., or they can be original works written at a less demanding language level. Although they employ simplified language, graded readers do not necessarily lack narrative depth or avoid complex themes; often, they cover the same range of "serious" themes as books written for native speaker audiences.[1]
Graded readers are written with specific levels of grammatical complexity in mind and with vocabulary that is limited by frequency headword counts. For example, Level 1 in a series might be restricted to 500 headwords, Level 2 to 600 headwords, and Level 3 to 700 headwords.[2] Simple English Wikipedia is designed along similar lines. Other factors are taken into consideration when selecting titles to publish, or determining levels, might include the number and range of characters; the complexity of the plot; the expected background of the target audience; compliance requirements for certain markets (regarding e.g., sex, dating, religion, gender roles and sexuality, etc.), among other factors.
When I started out learning Mandarin one of the things that used to irritate me the most was receiving vague and unhelpful replies from seasoned learners about precisely how they became fluent in the language. For some reason, these responses were most common when asking how they became proficient in Chinese reading. The conversation would typically go something like this:
The discovery of graded readers made a big difference to my Chinese learning and for the first time gave me real hope that attaining a high level of reading proficiency was possible without large amounts of prolonged pain. I first encountered them soon after passing my HSKIII exam in 2019. At that time I had acquired around 500 characters, largely through a painstaking process of combining flashcards with DuoLingo and boring short textbook dialogues. After spending so much time and effort on memorising these characters it was quite dispiriting to discover that native texts were still way beyond my grasp. I started looking around for a solution.
The two graded reader series I found were Mandarin Companion and Beijing University Press. Each book contains a mini-novel and audiobook using the most common Chinese characters and includes definitions of rarer words at the bottom of the page for ease of reference. The readers are set at difficulty levels according to how many distinct words they contain. I started with a novel set at a 500-word limit about a mother who became estranged from her teenage son after he ran away from home. Obviously, this is not high literature but I actually found it quite moving. I have since discovered that Mandarin Companion offers storybooks starting from as low as 150 characters, which I would have taken advantage of had I known they were available earlier.
Having previously relied on shorter texts, to begin with, I was not accustomed to reading large sections or paragraphs of text in one go. Although I could recognise most of the characters, many of the sentence structures were hard at first and took time to decode. Yet after completing a couple of books this became much easier as my brain started making sense of the grammatical patterns it was being exposed to. I continued to combine graded readers with flashcards until I reached over 1000 characters. This enabled me to build my reading fluency while expanding my character base and vocabulary in a way that was quite painless.
My conclusion after reading most of the books in both series was that graded readers were part of the answer, rather than the full answer. Knowing 1000 characters is a very solid base on which to build but not enough to be comfortable reading newspapers and novels. This base enabled me to start tackling simpler native articles with the help of LingQ, a process I have described in some detail elsewhere. With enough time I was eventually able to read real Chinese novels and graded readers played an important role in this process for me (I detail exactly what I did to become fluent in Mandarin in my free eBook, Lessons from a Chinese Learning Phenomenon.)
Usually you will be able to get a lot of graded readers starting from N4, but if you start to read a lot, you will be there in no time anyway.
If you want a subscription, LingQ has 60 mini stories for beginners which teach words and grammar naturally. Those alone should get you close to N4 if you go through them multiple times.
Thanks to you all WaniKani-ans, earlier this year, I published Japanese Books For Upper Beginners. Seems like Tofugu readers have been enjoying the recommendations from their fellow Japanese learners.
I am thinking beginners around JLPT N5, Tadoku L0-L1, WaniKani Level 1-10. Beginners who are not quite ready to read native content, but want to start getting familiar with reading Japanese text with graded readers.
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I am personally working on a project that aims to provide content to read to absolute beginners. It is here :
There are about 60 stories but only the first 27 have been proofread by a native speaker. As written somewhere else on this forum, throughout the stories :
Words are introduced using Emojis and others are derived from the context by the reader. They are then repeated as often as possible to act like a natural SRS. The idea is that if you keep reading, you assimilate easy words and learn new ones on the way without having to stop to check the meaning of a word in a dictionary.
Since I teach in the U.S., I always prefer using books written in American English over books written in British or other varieties of English. This can actually be a little difficult, as it seems that the majority of graded readers are written in British English. In my reviews below, all of the book titles that I specifically mention are written in American English, unless otherwise noted.
This is another one of my favorite series. Most of the books are written in British English, though there are a handful in American English. The stories are well-written and engaging to my students. Most of the books are aimed at adults; however, there are some with teenagers as the main characters.
These book recommendations are based on my own experiences, and, of course, I can only tell you what has worked well for me in my classroom. Your students and your teaching context might be quite different from mine. But I hope that these reviews have at least helped to give you an idea of what kind of books are available for English language learners.
Our Readers series has been carefully graded from Starter to Upper Intermediate (A1-B2) to help students choose the right reading material for their level. The collection includes popular classics, contemporary titles, original fiction, plays, autobiographies and non-fiction. Most titles are also available as eBooks and audio downloads.
Graded readers are reading material written in a controlled vocabulary. This page includes out-of-print graded readers and mid-frequency readers adapted for learners with vocabulary sizes of around 4,000, 6,000, and 8,000 word families. You can find more free graded readers at
The following graded readers were created by Gerry Meister and Paul Nation. They are now out of copyright and are available free for anyone who wants to use them. They can be distributed free but must not be offered for sale.
These mid-frequency graded readers are books within a controlled vocabulary. They can be used in extensive reading programs or for individual study and enjoyment. They are designed to help learners learn mid-frequency vocabulary and to read texts that would otherwise be too difficult for them.
The readers are available free for advanced learners of English as a foreign or second language, but they must not be offered for sale. More information about mid-frequency graded readers is available. Also see Nation, I.S.P. & Anthony, L. (2013). Mid-frequency readers. Journal of Extensive Reading, 1(1), 5-16.
A Christmas Carol is a novel written in the 19th century. It tells of the transformation of a mean-spirited man, Scrooge, into a generous and kind one. The transformation occurs when one Christmas he is visited by three ghosts who show him visions of Christmas in his past, present, and future. The author, Charles Dickens, writes in the style of his time and uses sentence structures and punctuation in ways that may not be familiar to the modern reader. He also uses a lot of descriptive language and some of the comparisons he makes might be unfamiliar. However, the story is clear and enjoyable.
The Garden Party and Other Stories are thought to be based on Katherine Mansfield's recollections of her childhood in New Zealand. There are 15 stories in the collection. They are available for download in the table above as zip files. The name of the person who kindly adapted each story to be a mid-frequency reader is listed on the first page of each story.
This 1886 novella questions the nature of man, his morals, and his choices. It tells the story of a morally righteous scientist who desperately wants an opportunity to indulge his darkest desires and impulses. Eventually he discovers a means by which he can live two lives, one as the upright academic and valued member of the community, and one as the brash and reviled monster that dwells within him. After giving his inner evil freedom, however, he discovers that it is not easy to put the monster back in its cage.
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