Deciding levels & grades

Authors of graded-readers are skillful in how they adjust their language for EFL learners and still create an interesting story that sounds like natural English. Publishers, however, are not explicit enough about the criteria they use for deciding the levels of their graded-readers. At the lowest level of graded-reader especially, publishers and us seem to have different ideas about what the average beginner-level EFL learner in JHS can truly cope with. On one hand, the sentences and words used at this level do feel manageable no matter the publisher but, on the other, the number of words each page displays varies dramatically among publishers. It has been difficult to find enough so-called beginner-level graded-readers that would not scare away the average JHS student as soon as he or she opened the book.

Uniformity between the various publishers' levels not to be had, TEREP follows its own system for slotting a graded-reader into one of four levels. Mainly done by an impression/consensus basis among the teachers, the general rules of thumb we follow are:

• Pink books have large illustrations, 1-2 short sentences per page, and can be easily read by even beginner-level learners within a class period
• Green books have large illustrations, 3-5 sentences per page, and can be read (perhaps even by a beginner-level learner) within a day 3
• Yellow books have (roughly) half-page illustrations, 5 or more sentences per page, require 2 or more days to finish, and, for beginner-level learners, would prove a challenge
• Blue books are a dust-bin category for everything else beyond the first three levels, and is used for books which are ordered singly with individual high-level learners in mind.

Student grades are based on the number of pages read per term. Obviously, though, not all pages are created equal. Higher-level graded-readers have more words (and less illustrations) per page -- they weigh more, in a manner of speaking. Based on this principle TEREP relies on a Weighted Page system, not only to add up page counts or to make things fair but to also encourage students to first practice reading at a comfortable level and then progress up from there when ready.

Working from a 26-week school year and given an average reading goal of a 15 to 20 page book per week (about 400 pages in one year), TEREP uses the following Weighted Page (WP) counting formulas: