English Graded Readers Built for Your Students

Key Facts About the English Language

Speakers

About 1.46 billion speakers in total (2021): roughly 380 million native speakers and 1.08 billion second-language speakers, according to Wikipedia's English language article.¹

Did you know?

English spelling began to be standardised in the 15th and 16th centuries, while the Great Vowel Shift (roughly 1400–1700) was changing how vowels were pronounced. This is the major reason English spellings often don't match pronunciation.²

The main challenge

Phrasal verbs such as give in ("yield") or grow up ("mature") usually can't be understood from their parts, so each has to be learned as a unit.³

CEFR exams

• Cambridge English Qualifications (Cambridge University Press & Assessment; A2 Key to C2 Proficiency)
• IELTS (British Council, IDP and Cambridge; band scores, with a published CEFR alignment, e.g. bands 5.5–6.5 = B2)
• TOEFL iBT (ETS; not designed as a CEFR exam, but ETS publishes a mapping of its 1–6 score scale to A1–C2)

Where students struggle

• Present simple vs present continuous: He works at McDonald's states a fact, while He is working at McDonald's presents it as ongoing now, and the continuous can also describe a fixed future plan (He is meeting Peter this afternoon).⁴

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb
4. https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-grammar-reference/present-tense

About the English language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet
3. https://www.un.org/en/our-work/official-languages
4. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en

English reading proficiency benchmarks (ACTFL)

The ACTFL column is approximate and describes reading. ACTFL publishes how its ratings convert to CEFR levels, not the reverse, so read it as a rough guide rather than an official equivalence.

Reference corpora

Three widely cited references for English vocabulary and usage:^1,2,3

• COCA: Mark Davies’s Corpus of Contemporary American English holds more than one billion words from 1990 to 2019, spread evenly across genres that include speech, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academic journals and TV and film subtitles.¹
• British National Corpus: About 100 million words of late-20th-century British English, roughly 90% written and 10% transcribed speech, built by a consortium led by Oxford University Press (first edition 1994).²
• English Vocabulary Profile: Cambridge’s profile shows which words, meanings and phrases learners know at each CEFR level from A1 to C2, drawing on learner writing in the Cambridge Learner Corpus.³
• Register: Stichos uses standard General American or British vocabulary and spelling, avoiding regional slang, archaic terms and rare jargon.

1. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
2. https://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
3. https://englishprofile.org/?menu=english-vocabulary-profile

Readability design principles

The classic English readability formulas are built on sentence length and syllables per word.¹

• Flesch Reading Ease: Rudolf Flesch’s score (“A New Readability Yardstick”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 1948) rises as sentences and words get shorter. A score of 90 to 100 is rated very easy, readable by an average 11-year-old.²
• Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level: Kincaid, Fishburne, Rogers and Chissom (1975) recalculated readability formulas for the US Navy using 531 enlisted personnel, expressing difficulty as a US school grade.¹
• Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a formula score. A0 has no conjunctions at all; and, but and so unlock first, and because, although, unless and whereas follow at higher levels.

1. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/istlibrary/56/
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18867058/

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Tenses: A0 uses the present simple of a few core verbs (be, have, like, want, drink, eat). A1 adds the present continuous, the past of be only, and can for ability. A2 opens the past simple, going to and will, and must and should. The present perfect, past continuous, first conditional and passive arrive at B1.
• Later forms: B2 adds the past perfect, the present perfect continuous, second, third and mixed conditionals, and modal perfects such as should have. C1 adds the past and future perfect continuous, the subjunctive, negative inversion and cleft sentences.
• Automatic checks: At A0 and A1 Stichos’s rule checker also flags would have, had been and have been + -ing in any sentence, to catch third conditionals and perfect continuous forms in a beginner text.
• Requests and imperatives: Beginner requests use a noun phrase and a politeness word (A coffee, please). A0 allows imperatives only inside fixed formulas such as Here you are; A1 adds five: look, come, take, wait and sit down, used between friends.

Related academic & framework resources

• ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines: ACTFL’s description of what learners can do in reading, listening, speaking and writing, from Novice to Distinguished.
• Assigning CEFR Ratings to ACTFL Assessments: How ACTFL ratings correspond to CEFR levels, in one direction only.
• English Vocabulary Profile: Cambridge’s free online profile of English vocabulary by CEFR level.
• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): Mark Davies’s corpus of more than one billion words, searchable online.
• British National Corpus: The home page of the 100-million-word collection of written and spoken British English.
• Derivation of New Readability Formulas for Navy Enlisted Personnel: The 1975 report by J. Peter Kincaid and colleagues.
• A new readability yardstick (Flesch, 1948): The PubMed record of Rudolf Flesch’s 1948 paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Frequently Asked Questions for English Teachers

What is included in the free preview right now?

Without creating an account, you can try an A0 or A1 story generated live in the browser with tap-to-translate assistance. Additionally, joining the Reading List grants you 3 free sample stories provided as a PDF.

Which CEFR levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?

At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 through B2, allowing you to generate texts for absolute beginners up to upper-intermediate learners.

How do I share generated stories with my students?

At launch, you will be able to share any story you generate by sending your students a link. There will be no limit on how many share links you can create.

Do my students need to register for an account to read stories?

No, students simply open the shared link directly in their web browser without making an account. They are invited to create a free account if they wish to save their words and stories, but it is never required.

How does audio pronunciation work for students?

At launch, students reading a shared story can tap any word to hear a standard computer voice pronounce it. If you add the Premium Audio option at launch, students gain natural-sounding voices for individual words, full story narration with distinct voices for dialogue characters, and MP3 audio exports.

Can I customize the vocabulary and grammar rules in a story?

Yes, at launch you will be able to paste a custom word list for Stichos to build a story around, turn specific tenses on or off, select any topic, and edit any sentence or translation before sending it to your class.

Are the AI-written texts completely error-free?

Stories are generated by AI and automatically verified against the vocabulary and grammar rules of that level. Because this automated check is not a human editor, an occasional mistake might slip through, so you should review each text before sharing it with your students.

Why do English spellings often differ from how words sound?

English spelling started to become standardized during the 15th and 16th centuries. Around the same period (roughly 1400–1700), the Great Vowel Shift significantly altered how vowels were pronounced, creating a long-standing gap between written letters and spoken sounds.