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Free graded reading texts - levels A2 to C1 - with interactive worksheets and audio.

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Essential written comprehension

More ideas for reading comprehension

The Linguapress archive

In the age of social media, teachers can often be heard lamenting the fact that their students find it hard to write or read anything longer than 140 characters.  Hopefully this is an exaggeration! But whether it is or not, the lament is symptomatic of an age where, according to surveys worldwide, today's students have more difficulty than those of previous generations in reading and understanding extended texts.

  Linguapress online offers a wide and growing choice of free-access graded and carefully prepared reading resources for students of English as a foreign language, or English as a second language, from age 15 upwards, ideal for use in high schools, colleges and  language schools worldwide.

Web pages are printer-friendly, making them generally easier to print than PDF pages.

The large majority of reading resources on Linguapress.com are longer than the classic 300 - 500 word documents commonly used for testing, and offered on many Internet sites and school textbooks. This is because reading resources on Linguapress.com are designed firstly for teaching and learning, and only secondarily for testing.

Teaching and testing are two very different activities, and in an age where the majority of language learning books and resources are geared primarily to preparing students to pass tests or gain qualifications, Linguapress resources prioritize learning and education over testing, in the perhaps old-fashioned belief that there is more to studying English than just learning how to pass tests and exams.

Unlike press cuttings and excerpts from books, the majority – though not all – of the articles and stories published on Linguapress.com are custom written or edited specifically with learners of English in mind. In addition, they come with vocabulary guides designed to help the non-native English speaker with some of the more difficult words or expressions, with worksheets (mostly interactive for use online or on an interactive whiteboard), and in many cases with audio too.

The original Linguapress magazines, published in print until 2001, were authentic language learning newsmagazines, filled with a mix of topical articles relating to news events, current affairs, culture and general background information on life in the English speaking countries.. The majority of these are now out-of-date and have not been reproduced in the Linguapress online archive.

Those items that have been retained for republishing on Linguapress.com tend to be those that have a timeless or cultural interest, articles about life, ways, traditions and icons in the English speaking countries, mainly the USA and Britain. Others include short stories, as well as transcripts of discussions with teenagers and young people in Britain, on subjects that remain as important, and as interesting, today as they were when they were first recorded in the 1990s.

In addition to archived material, much of which has been brought up to date, Linguapress.com has an increasing number of new documents written specially for the website, and covering topics of more recent interest.

While teachers may find many articles and stories that are not appropriate for their particular teaching environment, there should be plenty of interesting reading resources for all those teachers who realise that teaching English is more than just teaching words and phrases, but involves also teaching students to understand the life and cultural background of the English speaking countries.

Approaching the written text - reading comprehension

Articles, interviews and discussions on Linguapress.com are suitable for private study and use in class. Each text is accompanied by exercises and ideas for teachers, for use in class. While all documents can be used as "reading comprehension texts", articles in the LInguapress archive are accompanied by a range of different exercises and activities to develop different language skills, including vocabulary acquisition, careful reading, free expression, rephrasing, punctuation, and more.

Going further: ►  Ideas for reading comprehension in the ESL/EFL class

Go to the Linguapres archive : intermediate texts   -   advanced texts

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