Today we’re looking at reading resources for your English language students that are free and online. These resources are for adults, teens or kids so whatever age group you’re teaching, you can use them in your class.
Reading over at Commonlit
This website we’re going to check out is completely free and is graded for your learners. We’re talking about commonlit.org. When we’re on the home page we can either browse content, search by genre, grade level, literary device, or theme.
The first popular reading text that we used on this website was about the “Rose that grew from concrete” which is actually a poem by Tupac and this was particularly interesting for my teen students. It’s a poem and led to questions they had about Tupac as a person. For each text we have questions we can ask our students. These range from comprehension to assessment questions. Another popular one that my students chose, particularly my older students, was the story of David and Goliath. Everyone’s familiar with this story but a lot of my students hadn’t read the story in English. The grade level is higher so I used this with my more advanced learners. The final reading activity that I used with my most advanced learners from commonlit was the one about the landlady by Roald Dahl. It’s quite a dark story with an unexpected ending. The text is longer and is for advanced learners.
Children can read at Storynory
The next website is Storynory. This is perfect for children, but if you have adults or teens that are also interested in short stories or fairy tales then you could also share this with them. We can find original stories, fairy tales, stories by classic authors, myths, and educational poems. These are great because your students are probably already familiar with the story but they haven’t read it in English. Students can read this alone or we can listen to the story together. You can also download the audio and share this onto another platform.
If you are looking for more reading resources for young learners, then check out my blog post on current affairs site for kids right here.
Reading resources at Simple Wikipedia
The final reading resource for your students online that is absolutely free is simple Wikipedia. You probably use the Wikipedia’s normal English version but I feel that this website is perfect for your English learners. A lot of English speaking people use Wikipedia’s normal version to look up facts events or information about anything. It looks very much the same as the normal Wikipedia website and we’ve got all the same functions, you can search for events, we can look at what’s new, and we have the ‘did you know?’ section as well. Now obviously there are no single pages that I would recommend to use here, I would say to your students that if they do use Wikipedia in their own language then start using simple English Wikipedia instead.
If you’d like your students to practice their reading in a fun and authentic way then go ahead and share these websites with them today.