When to Move from Graded Readers to Original Books

Stage 6, the top level of the Oxford Bookworms Library, is written with 2,500 headwords. Paul Nation, the vocabulary researcher, estimated that understanding an English novel well without a dictionary takes 8,000 to 9,000 word families. The two are counted differently, so the numbers do not compare directly. Still, they show that there is a real step between the top of a graded reader series and an original book.

This post is for learners who have read a good number of graded readers and want to try books written for native speakers. It looks at when to move, what to read first, and what to do after.

What graded readers do well, and where they stop

The Extensive Reading Foundation’s guide describes graded readers as books whose plot, vocabulary and grammar are tightly controlled, level by level, so that learners can read quickly and fluently. It notes that native books have many words that appear only once or twice, while graded readers drop low-frequency words and make useful words appear more often. It also calls graded readers “a bridge to the eventual reading of native-level reading materials”.

I think “bridge” is exactly the right word. What graded readers give you is the chance to keep reading English as English, without being stopped by unknown words. For building up the amount you read, nothing does it better.

Their limit comes from the same place. Because the language is controlled, you rarely meet what is particular to original books: rare words, long narrative sentences, the habits of a single writer’s style. A retold classic keeps the plot, but the voice of the original is mostly gone. You can walk the bridge as long as you like, and you still will not be standing on the other bank.

Signs you are ready

I think it is time to try one original book when three things are true.

You read the upper levels with ease. The ERF guide puts fluent extensive reading at no less than 150 to 200 words per minute. If you can read the higher levels of a graded series at that speed and understand nearly all of it, you are near the end of the bridge.

The first page of an original book works. Take an original book you want to read and read page one without a dictionary. If there are one or two unknown words on the page and you can follow what is happening, you can read it extensively. If unknown words come every few lines, that book can wait. I trust this check more than any test score. I describe it in more detail in How to Do Extensive Reading in English.

Graded readers have started to feel thin. If you finished a retold version and thought, I want to read how the author actually wrote it, that is reason enough. Wanting to read is the strongest thing that keeps extensive reading going.

Sometimes only the third sign is there. In that case, reading both, which I come to below, suits you well.

Choosing a first original book

For a first original, choose something where the step is small. These are the kinds of books I suggest.

Short books. With a short book, you can reach the end even with a fair number of unknown words. Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit is about 1,000 words, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz about 40,000.

Short story collections. A Sherlock Holmes story runs about 7,000 to 10,000 words, and each one closes a case. Which story to start with is in Reading Sherlock Holmes in the Original.

A story you already know. The original of a book you read as a graded reader is easier to follow, because you know the plot. Expect it to be much longer than the retelling, though.

On the other hand, books with a lot of dialogue written in dialect, or books whose humour depends on wordplay, are poor first choices. Being a great book and being a good first book are different things. I wrote about what makes an original book hard in Choosing English Books by Level.

Reading both at once

Moving to original books does not mean giving up graded readers. I think it works better to keep both.

The ERF guide has an interesting line on this. It says students should read anything they can read quickly and fluently, and then adds that research shows greater fluency gains from reading graded readers alone than from reading both graded readers and unsimplified texts.

I read this not as “do not read originals” but as “keep the bulk of your reading easy”. What builds reading ability is a large amount of English you can read without effort. The original book is the one challenge you add on top. For example, most of your daily reading can stay with graded readers, and the original gets one chapter a day. As originals get easier, give them a larger share.

If an original book stalls, go back to graded readers. That is not going backwards. It is spending a little more time on the bridge.

Test scores

Many learners would like a test score to tell them when to switch. A score measures how well you answer test questions. Whether you can enjoy a whole book also depends on its length, subject and style. I use scores as a rough starting point and let the first page decide.

Reading your first original in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the Project Gutenberg catalogue of English books. It has no graded readers, so it is meant for the original-book stage this post is about.

The Start here shelf on the Discover screen has 30 short, plain classics chosen for learners. There are also shelves such as Children, Fairy tales, Short stories and Detective, where you can find the short books and collections mentioned above. While reading, long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses. Each word you look up is saved to your word book with the sentence you met it in, and comes back later in a quiz.

If you are looking up words several times a page, take it as a sign to change books. There are no ads and no account, and books read offline once downloaded. How much vocabulary original books ask for is in How Many English Words Do You Need to Read a Novel?