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Helpful Reading Resources

These links connect to great resources and tools for your learners academic reading success. 

Additional Reading Skills

 

Gunderson (1991), Grabe and Stoller (2011), and Jensen (1986) all list several strategies and skills that benefit the academic reading. Each author emphasizes a different aspect of reading. Looking at reading strategies from multiple perspectives provides evidence that academic reading requires students to be both fluent and critical readers.

Visit Additional Reading Skills Page

 

Downloadable Graphic Organizers

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There are many websites and resources devoted to graphic organizers. Keep in mind that graphic organizers are great for helping learners improve their reading comprehension, knowledge of text organization, and their ability to analyze and synthesize. Here are just a few links to different websites with templates or examples of various graphic organizers that you can share with your learners.

http://www.writedesignonline.com/organizers/

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/k_5/graphorg/

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/graphic-organizers-reading-comprehension

http://freeology.com/graphicorgs/

 

American Institute's Reading Strategies

 

American Institute for Research lists about 30 additional reading strategies. Each strategy has a basic definition, overview, and procedure. Some even go through an example. As a teacher, you will have to make decisions about which strategies to teach and help your learners understand when to use each strategy. 

Connect to more reading strategies â€‹(currently unavailable) 

Quizlet.com



This site allows you or your learners to create or find flash cards. Using flash cards is a great way to learn new vocabulary and concepts. Quizlet not only allows you to create flash cards and provides different ways to study;  additionally, there are options to print, email, or copy the flashcards. You and your learners can also search for existing flash cards, like Academic Word Lists (AWL), Greek and Latin Roots, GRE or GMAT vocabulary, important people in history, etc.

(Note: you will want preview existing cards, because they can be created by anyone and are not always 100% accurate)

https://quizlet.com

Lexile.com

 

This site is a great tool, but can be hard to navigate. In this site you can find both your leaners Lexile (reading) level or an electronic text's reading level. It also allows you to search for books at a specific level. Most college texts are between 1250L and 1450L Lexile level. 

https://lexile.com

Englishvocabularyexercises.com

 

This site is a great resource for learning and practicing new vocabulary. It has several gap-filling exercises devoted to both general and academic vocabulary lists. It is a great place for your learners to study and quiz their vocabulary knowledge. 

Find general vocabulary exercises (currently unavailable) 

Find academic vocabulary exercises (currently unavailable) 

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

 

A corpus is a collection of language (both written and spoken). This corpus contains over 450 million words. The great thing about a corpus is that you and your learners can use it to search for words, phrases, parts of speech, collocates (word partners), etc. My favorite way to use COCA is searching for example sentences and collocates for new vocabulary. This allows your learners to see new words in context and can help them identify words used together, or word partners.

Start using COCA

 

Evernote

 

This is a free application your learners can use for note taking.  Not only can they take notes, they can also organize these notes into folders, label the notes by keywords, and search their "notebook". These notes are also backed up online, so your learners will never have to worry about losing their work and they can access it anywhere. This is a great tool for studying and reading.

Connect to Evernote's website 

Get Evernote (for computer or as an app)

Teleprompters

 

Using an online teleprompter can be a great way to encourage reading fluency, especailly reading rate. Teleprompters are motivating as they help learners read at a consistant pace and alert them to things that hinder their fluency. Here are links to two that allow you to use any text that can be copied and then pasted: 

http://cueprompter.com/

http://www.freeteleprompter.org/

University Library Pages

 

Often, university libraries provide online helps for learners. Some of these helps include: study tools, research tips, and library vocabulary. Here are a just a few example library links. You should help your learners become familiar with their library's resources (Note: if you do not have a library or online resources, you can have your learners become familiar with some of these).

http://liblearn.osu.edu/tutor/les6/index.html (Ohio States research strategies) 

http://guides.lib.byu.edu/stepbystep (BYU's research guide)

http://guides.lib.byu.edu/terminology (BYU's Library terminology) 

A Pocket Style Manual's Online Resources

 

These online resources are from Diana Hacker's book A Pocket Style Manual. While the focus of this resource is on writing, there are great links for citation styles, integrating sources, and specific helps for ESL learners. (Note: most resources do not require a login) â€‹

View ESL helps (study charts/helps, example papers, grammar exercises) 

View helpsheets (writing, grammar, clarity, ESL, punctuation)

Get advice on how to research & cite sources

Reading Rate Checks 

 

These are two links will help your learners discover how fast they are reading. Finding reading rate may be confusing for both the teacher and the learner.

Learn more about how to find your reading rate

Do an online reading rate check

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