Choosing English Books by Level: How Beginners Can Finish Their First Book

The Oxford Bookworms Library, a graded reader series from Oxford University Press, has seven levels. The easiest, Starter, is written with 250 headwords. Stage 1 uses 400, Stage 2 uses 700, Stage 3 uses 1,000, Stage 4 uses 1,400, Stage 5 uses 1,800 and Stage 6 uses 2,500 (Oxford University Press Japan). Books for learners carry a label like this: the number of words they are written in.

The classics on Project Gutenberg carry no label. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Moby Dick sit side by side, and both are great English books. This post covers how to use a graded reader ladder, and how to estimate the level of a book that has no label at all, so that your first real book is one you finish.

Reading the numbers on a level chart

A headword count is the range of words a book at that level is allowed to use. A 250-headword book is written with roughly those 250 words and their forms. If your vocabulary is larger than that, you should meet very few unknown words.

The same page gives a check for whether a level is right. There are no more than one or two unknown words per page. You can read about eight to ten lines a minute. You understand most of what you read. I find this practical. Measuring your own vocabulary is hard, but anyone can read a page and see. I described a simple first-page check in How to Do Extensive Reading in English.

I think it is better to start a level low. If the books feel too easy, you move up, and a few books are enough to tell. If you start too high, you may come to dislike reading before you think of changing books.

What makes a real book hard

Unlabelled books need you to collect the clues yourself. I look at four.

The first is length. Word count decides whether you can get to the end. Counting the Project Gutenberg texts without the notices at the start and end, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit is about 1,000 words, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz about 40,000, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn about 111,000, and Moby Dick about 213,000. All of them are classics, and the longest is more than 200 times the shortest. For a first book, I would stay under a few tens of thousands of words.

The second is when the book was written. Older books tend to have longer sentences and more words and phrases nobody uses now. Robinson Crusoe (1719) has a simple story, but its sentences take time to get used to. Children’s books from the late 19th and early 20th century often feel much closer to today’s English.

The third is dialect and spoken language. When a book writes its dialogue in dialect, you meet spellings that are not in any dictionary. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens with an explanatory note from Mark Twain: “In this book a number of dialects are used,” followed by the dialects he means, among them “the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect” and the “Pike County” dialect. It is careful work for native readers. For a learner, it is a wall.

The fourth is wordplay. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is short, about 27,000 words, and easy to follow, but much of its humour is puns. There are lines you will not understand even after looking up every word. Short does not always mean easy.

Famous books to save for later

Being a classic and being a good first book are different things. By the four clues above, I would keep these for a second book or much later.

Moby Dick is long, and the story keeps stopping for chapters on the classification of whales and the tools of whaling, which is hard going when you read for the story. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the dialect problem described above. In Wuthering Heights (about 116,000 words), the servant Joseph speaks in broad Yorkshire dialect, and many learners stall there. Shakespeare writes in verse, in English more than 400 years old.

All of them are worth reading. But if your first book leaves you thinking you can’t read English books, there may not be a second one. I believe that collecting the experience of finishing books first gets you to the great ones sooner.

Exam scores and books

Many learners hope an exam score will tell them which books they can read. Some graded reader publishers show how their levels line up with the CEFR or other scales, and you can check that on the publisher’s site. Those are the publisher’s own guides.

For unabridged books there is no official mapping. A score measures how well you handle exam questions. Whether you can enjoy and finish a particular book also depends on its length, subject and style. I wrote about what CEFR comparison tables can and can’t tell you in How to Read a CEFR Comparison Table. I would use a score to decide where to start looking, and let the first page make the final call.

Moving from graded readers to real books

Once the upper graded reader levels feel comfortable, it is time to try real books. Stories you already know, short fables and fairy tales, and books written for children keep the step small. Genre helps too. Detective stories pull you forward, so a few unknown words don’t stop you.

If it doesn’t work, go back to graded readers for a while. Moving back and forth, and slowly raising the share of real books, is a perfectly good way to do it.

Choosing books in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the Project Gutenberg catalogue of English books, more than 61,000 of them, searchable by title and author without a connection. It has no graded readers, so it is for the real-book stage this post describes.

Besides Start here, a shelf of 30 short, plainly written classics chosen for learners, the Discover screen has genre shelves such as Children, Fairy tales, Short stories and Detective, which match the ways in suggested above. While reading, long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses. If you find yourself doing that several times a page, take it as the sign to change books.

There are no ads and no account, and books read offline once downloaded. More about the library itself is in What Is Project Gutenberg?, and the steps to your first book are in Getting Started with ABC George.