We greatly appreciate you taking the time to comment on our site. We’ve gone through a rather big change recently. We use a new platform: WordPress, and we are now a membership site, but users can sign up for a free trial. We also have more than 250 stories now.

As for the levels, we use lexical profiling software based on Paul Nation’s Range program. The levels are basically set up so that in our Step 1 stories, 95% of the words must come from the top 1000 words of English (in the British National Corpus). In our Step 2 stories, 95% of the words must come from the top 2000 words of English (in the British National Corpus).

We’ve actually done a lot of research on this, and of course, our stories have been used in classes with hundreds and hundreds of students in Japan. For the most part, they find the stories “readable” and “enjoyable.” We do need to make more Step 1 stories! But they are harder to make.

Just FYI, here’s one of the papers published about our stories (and the related topic of extensive graded reading).

http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2010/articles/poulshock.pdf

We would be so happy if you could take a look at our site again and give us feedback. As you may remember (I think I told you), after we published a short and softly worded story about Tank Man, our site became pretty much unsearchable from China. The only link that showed us after a search from a Chinese site was readable blog. Thanks for that!

Sincerely,

Joseph Poulshock, PhD
Professor of English Linguistics
Director of English Language Education
Tokyo Christian University
Editor, BeeOasis.com
Follow me on Twitter
Blog: DrShock.net

My only caveat is that I prefer to have students find their own newspaper articles, fill out a simple worksheet where they summarize and critique, and create their own vocabulary logs. This site, however, provides good hunting grounds for ESL/EFL students looking for articles to meet that assignment.