What is the difference between graded readers and leveled readers?

A graded reader is a book written or retold for people learning a foreign language. The Extensive Reading Foundation describes them as books “specially created for learners of foreign languages”, graded because “the syntax and lexis are controlled”. Each publisher sets a word list and a grammar syllabus for each level, and most state the size of that list in headwords: Oxford Bookworms, for example, runs from 250 headwords to 2,500. Levels are usually labelled with the CEFR scale, A1 to C2, which the Council of Europe built to describe what language learners can do.

A leveled reader (also spelled levelled) is a book for a child who is learning to read in their first language, placed on a gradient of difficulty so that a teacher can match it to the child. Fountas & Pinnell, whose letter levels are used for guided reading, describe their gradient as a teaching and assessment tool in which each level is “a small but significant increase in difficulty”. A level is a composite of ten characteristics: genre, text structure, content, themes and ideas, language and literary features, sentence complexity, vocabulary, words, illustrations, and book and print features.

The child already speaks the language. What a leveled reader controls at first is the job of reading itself: how many words on a page, how much the pictures help, how long the sentences are, how easy the words are to decode. Owners such as Fountas & Pinnell and MetaMetrics publish which levels children usually read in which school year, and Fountas & Pinnell’s blog stresses: “Above all else, a level is a teacher’s tool, not a child’s label”.

None of these was built for language learners. The one partial exception is GB+'s “high-low” collection, which Chenelière describes as books for older children who need a lot of support, including children learning French as a second language; its GB+ En action series is for ages 8 to 14.

• Day one in a new language. The lowest levels carry a few words per page and lean on pictures. African Storybook’s first level, “First words”, allows up to 11 words a page.
• Languages with few or no graded readers. African Storybook has 5,513 storybooks in 262 languages. If your language has no graded readers, a children’s library like this may be the only leveled text you can find.
• Lexile-measured English books. If an English book carries a Lexile measure, MetaMetrics’ CEFR alignment (below) gives a rough level for it. We found no such link for the other children’s systems.

Where they don’t: from about A2 on, a graded reader gives more story for the same effort, with topics written for your age. Whichever kind you pick, the test is the same: read one page and count the words you don’t know. For easy reading in quantity, Paul Nation and Rob Waring suggest no more than three or four on a page. The full test is on Is this book right for my level?

For Lexile there is one published alignment; for grade-based letter and number levels such as Fountas & Pinnell, GB+ and PM, we found none. In August 2021 MetaMetrics, the owner of Lexile, pooled 34,477 students who had taken nine English tests (TOEFL Primary, Junior and iBT, four Aptis tests, Eiken and TOEIC), each already linked both to Lexile and, by its own publisher, to CEFR. It set a Lexile range for each CEFR level and calls the result “a first attempt”; the test and the Lexile range put 72% of students at the same level, and almost all of the rest one level apart.

Three limits before you use it. It is English only, built from English tests; Spanish Lexile is a separate scale. It compares reading scores, not people: a B1 adult and a sixth grader with the same Lexile measure bring very different knowledge to a book. And it is one study, which MetaMetrics planned to check with a panel of judges; we did not find a published result of that step.

MetaMetrics’ earlier research also shows why CEFR labels on graded readers are only a guide. A 2016 paper measured 332 graded readers from four publishers. Within each series, books got harder as the CEFR label rose, but across series the labels overlapped: A1 books ranged from below 0L to 650L, C1 books from 630L to 1280L. The middle half of B1 graded readers fell at 588L to 860L, lower than the 705L to 1210L range the same paper found for B1 students across four tests.

• African Storybook (Saide): 5,513 storybooks in 262 languages, under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Five reading levels, from “First words” (up to 11 words a page) to “Read aloud” (up to 150).
• StoryWeaver (Pratham Books): openly licensed stories (CC BY 4.0) in four reading levels, from “Beginning to Read” to “Reading Proficiently”; level 2 stories run 250 to 600 words, level 3 600 to 1,500, level 4 over 1,500.
• Oxford Owl free eBook library (Oxford University Press): hundreds of eBooks for ages 3 to 11, including Oxford Reading Tree, sorted by Oxford Level. Free, with registration.

The leveled books of the big systems are paid. Chenelière, for example, lists one year of online access to its GB+ library of 856 booklets, levels 1 to 30, at $325. Free graded readers for adults, such as ER Central and the State Department’s adapted classics, are a separate list: Where to find free graded readers.