For Lower Level English Learners

The internet is a fantastic place to find all kinds of reading materials in English. Unfortunately, the reading level can often be too difficult for students who don’t speak or read English fluently. Luckily, there are some great sites that focus on creating easier English reading selections for those learning English. Here are some suggestions:

Simple English News - This site provides news stories in simplified English for a wide variety of subjects.

The Bangkok Post - The Bangkok Post provides simplified versions of the regular stories provided in its newspaper. The site also includes an audio version of the article.

Easy English Times - This site has been designed specifically for English as a Second Language learners in the United States.

Intermediate Level Reading Comprehension Selections from About.com - This link is to the reading comprehension resources I provide at About.com. Each reading selection also includes a follow-up quiz to test your understanding.

For Upper Level English Learners

For those of you who read at an advanced English level the availability of resources on the internet is immense. Anything you could ever want to know, and probably more can be found online. Some of these resources are very reliable, others are not. It’s the joy of finding things serendipitously through surfing the web (idiom = visiting various pages on the internet).

However, there still may be many terms that surprise your or you may not know. KathyLee pointed out the usefulness of using Wikipedia for terms you run across. Wikipedia provides a great way to discover information about phrases and terms you may not know, beyond just a simple definition.

Recently the New York Times began providing a new tool when reading articles on the site. This tool is quite useful as it allows you to not only get definitions for words, but also provides other resources such as a thesaurus, list of idioms, jargon dictionaries (I ran across a military dictionary trying it out) and more. The great thing about this tools is that you can access all this wonderful learning information right from the page you are reading! Just highlight a word, and click on the little question mark that appears. Definitions, related vocabulary, idioms, etc. appear in a new pop-up window that will appear in your browser.

Finally, I would highly recommend a program that provides a dictionary that resides in your taskbar tray. It’s called Babylon and you can set this dictionary up to respond to a command that you provide. For example, on my computer I hold CTRL down and right click and the Babylon dictionary pops-up. It provides pronunciation examples, links to related Wikipedia articles, the ability to translate the entire selection of text surrounding what you have chosen and much more. It’s expensive, but for those who love language, it’s a wonderful tool to have available no matter which internet page you are on, or computer program you are using.