Extensive+Reading

Extensive Reading
Like Extensive Listening, the idea behind extensive reading is that you can improve your reading skills by reading a lot of things that are just a little above your current listening level. That is, you can understand almost all of what is being said, there being only a word or two, or an idea, that you don't understand. Using extensive reading is a good way to build up your reading skills to prepare yourself for IELTS reading.

www.newsy.com (American English) This website gathers the latest news from a number of different sources and combines them into short video s by topic with a transcript. This is ideal for listening, watching and reading the world's news in English. If you want to learn more about a story, Newsy.com gives you the links to each story's sources right above the video.

ESL Reading This website has a lot of interesting stories to read at whatever reading level you choose, making it a painless way to build your reading skills. The stories have vocabulary words, and activities such as exercises to check your understanding and videos, too! //Note//: The Christmas story, //A Christmas Carol//, that you read in Ruby's class is on this website but doesn't seem to be on any of the menus. You can get to it directly here: @http://christmascarol.esolebooks.com/

Breaking News English (British English) This website is huge, with over 1,300 short news stories and current events lessons with MP3s, transcripts, and exercises for reading and listening. In addition, there are easier news stories, over 13,000 conversation topics, and easy listening exercises.

Awesome Stories Another huge website with lots of non-fiction reading plus slide shows, videos, images, audio clips and original source documents. Types of stories include Biographies, Disasters, Famous Trials, Flicks (Movies), History, Inspiration, Religion, and Sports. You must sign up for the website to be able to get everything on it, but it's free and they will email you a newsletter every month telling about their latest additions.

rong-chang.com Over 100 short stories based on current news items. Each story comes with an audio file reading it aloud to you, as well as vocabulary, cloze, crosswords and other exercises. This site is very popular with English learners in the USA and Australia.

365 ESL Short Stories This is a continuation of the rong-chang.com website above, with a story for every day of the year. Many of the stories are about funny or unusual things in the news, like "Man Invents Toilet for Cars" or "A Life-Saving Cow." Like the website above, each story comes with an audio file reading it aloud to you, as well as vocabulary, cloze, crosswords and other exercises.

Candlelight Stories A collection of games, movies, audio, storybooks and fiction. Some of it is pretty advanced reading, but some of it isn't, and you might be able to find some things that are just right for you!

Reading Skills for Today's Adults Another large website with articles at various reading levels for adults who come to the United States and need to improve their English. The articles are mostly about everyday life and work in America, such as using an ATM and how to be a good employee, but you might find some of them interesting and useful. The stories have audio files with them so you can listen and read them at the same time.

Adult Learning Activities | California Distance Learning Project Another site for adult English learners with stories about life in the United States. Taken from newscasts on American television, each story has the original and a simplified version with audio, and many of the have a video of the original newscast.

Graded Readers
Many bookstores in China have a wide selection of graded readers. Graded readers are books on interesting topics specially written for English students and arranged by reading level. Have a look at a few of them to see what books interest you and are not too hard to read. They are cheap so you can buy several at a time, or, if nobody's looking, you and read them right there in the store!