Gradus: Next-level readers

Classic stories, slightly simplified, for readers from Advanced (C1, IELTS 7+) to Mastery (C2, IELTS 9).
From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.

 

Gradus Readers

Read English for fun - without a dictionary.

Gradus Readers from Linguetic are 'bridge readers'; they bridge the gap between typical 'graded readers' and real books. They're slightly simplified versions of classic stories.

H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Jack London, O. Henry, M.R. James, Saki, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Captain Marryat, Elizabeth von Arnim, G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Somerville & Ross... and less familiar names like Willa Cather, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Gaskell, W.W. Jacobs, Stella Benson and many more writers from the English-speaking world.

And why just English literature, when there are also marvellous short-story writers in other languages: Guy de Maupassant, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Alexander Pushkin, Albert Camus, André Gide, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Gabriel García Márquez, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Selma Lagerlöf, Antal Szerb, Mór Jókai, Sándor Hunyady, Matsuo Bashō, Natsume Sōseki and lots more.

 

What are 'bridge readers' for?

They build vocabulary - and they're fun.

They bridge the gap between conventional graded readers (with a vocabulary of 3,000 words) and the typical English-language book or newspaper (with a vocabulary of 15,000 words).

 

Who are 'bridge readers' for?

They're for people who want to use English for international study and work, and who are at Advanced (C1, IELTS 7+) or Mastery (C2, IELTS 9) level.

They are also great for readers at Upper Intermediate level (B2, IELTS 5+) as long as they enjoy the stories. Motivation is the most important thing when learning English, and an excellent story is very motivating!

 

Conventional graded readers

Language schools usually have some 'graded readers' from educational publishers like Heinemann, Macmillan, Penguin or Oxford. They're a very useful tool for learning English. They're a little longer than the pieces of English in school textbooks, but they're much shorter and easier than real books. They are usually based on a real book by somebody like Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, but they may be only 5% as long.

Graded readers follow a strict formula. For example, "1000 headwords, 4 tenses, no passive voice". It's impossible to follow a formula like that and keep the magic of the original book.

They use very simple language. They are certainly good for your English, but they they're not much fun to read. You won't want to re-read them the way you probably re-read your favourite books.

Click to see sample pages.

 

A few numbers

At Advanced level, conventional graded readers are deliberately limited to a vocabulary of about 3,000 headwords.*
But reading an ordinary English book takes a vocabulary of 15,000 words.

A British or American child aged 7 already has a vocabulary of 8,000 - 10,000 words.
A British or American university student has a vocabulary of 20,000 words.
Readers continue learning new words. By their 40s, these British and American people will have a vocabulary of 30,000 - 45,000 words.

Compare that with a person studying English as a second language. At Advanced (CEFR C1) level, probably aged 16-21, they will have a vocabulary of 8,000 - 10,000 words. Yes, the same as a child of 7. With that kind of vocabulary, an Advanced level student can't read an ordinary book in English except with the help of a big dictionary. It's hard work. And a graded reader with a vocabulary limited to 3,000 words is really not going to help with that.

*Headwords: "Book" and "quick" are headwords, but words derived from them (books, bookshop, quickly, quicker, quickest) are not.

 

Bridge readers

"When I talk to my students, they understand me because:
I speak more slowly,
I use simpler vocabulary and grammar,
I don't use strange idioms or dialect,
and if I say something unexpected, I explain it.
That's all. It's simple, but it works."

The aim of the Gradus project is to bridge that gap, with adaptations of classic short stories that stay close to the originals.

A Gradus reader doesn't start from a formula of "X000 words allowed"; it starts with a classic story, and replaces words and structures that the reader doesn't need to know.

A student probably doesn't want to learn all the words a native speaker would know; they just want to be able to communicate in international English. They don't need the English of friends and football matches, or of history and lit. crit: "Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp" - Donna Tartt, The Secret History.

She's right: Awry, brolly, cuddle, disdain, eerie, fond, glance, hearty, irked, jelly, kindly, leap, mate, nibble, ounce, peak, quaint, repent, startle, timber, undue, venom, weep, zigzag? They're all good words, but you don't need them for a Zoom meeting with colleagues from Hamburg, Santiago and Osaka.

 

Keeping the magic

So ... is it possible to re-write a classic story and keep the magic? Definitely!

Teenagers all over the world love Jack London's White Fang, but most of them know it in translation, as Croc Blanc, Colmillo Blanco, Zanna Bianca, Wolfsblut, Белый Клык, 白牙r 白い牙, الناب الأبيض or Ο Ασπροδόντης. JK Rowling's Harry Potter books have been translated into 65 languages, Agatha Christie has been translated into 103 languages, and hundreds of books are translated into English every year. Paulo Coelho, Stieg Larsson, Fred Vargas, Peter Høeg ...

Every translation is an adaptation, and literary adaptations are everywhere; we have all read them.
And when I'm not teaching English, I'm a French-to-English translator. Experto crede.

 

Gradus Readers

Click below to see sample pages from Gradus Readers.

They are slightly simplified. They're minimal adaptations, with the emphasis on 'minimal'. They're the same length as the originals.

If English is not your first language, you won't understand every word, but that's not necessary.

In your own language, you don't look for a dictionary every time you see a word you can't define. (Don't believe me? OK, define "irony"!)

People learning English are told to use a dictionary for every new word. At "bridge reader" level, knowing when NOT to use a dictionary becomes an important language skill.

 

Look inside - samples from Gradus Readers

The Return of Alcibiade is romantic and quirky; Sea Whispers is fun; Flory Cantillon's Funeral is one of many Irish fairy and folk tales that are grim and funny by turns; and The Door in the Wall makes you think.

Cover of The Return of Alcibiade
Cover of Sea Whispers
Cover of Irish Fairy & Folk Tales
Cover of The Door in the Wall

 

Gradus is a project

HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Frank R Stockton, Saki, MR James, Rudyard Kipling, Elizabeth von Arnim, Kate Chopin ... I've adapted and annotated the first 20 short stories in the Miscellany collection, and there will be many more in future. I'm having a lot of fun with this project myself!

The classic books of today are the best-sellers of the last 200 years, and they were best-sellers because people loved reading them.



"The past is another country; they do things differently there." - LP Hartley

In most cases, I'm working with short stories and novels that are out of copyright, so I don't have to ask anybody for permission to adapt them for international readers.

Many stories are from the 1880s - a very interesting time in the world! Sherlock Holmes was at work in London; Anthony Trollope was writing about English politeness and cucumber sandwiches; Billy the Kid was terrorising America's Wild West; the first 'skyscraper' was being built in Chicago; India was part of the British Empire; there were still real samurai in Japan; serfdom in Russia and slavery in America had only just ended; anarchists were bombing and assassinating in Europe; Elizabeth von Arnim was gardening; and Jerome K Jerome went for a boating holiday on the Thames with two friends and a dog called Montmorency.

 

Making classic literature accessible

Reading outdoors

Some families are musical; mine is literary. When I was growing up, publishers often sent my father 'proofs' of new books to test-read. My entire family (parents, big sisters and me) read constantly. We still buy books, exchange them, give them as gifts, donate them to charity shops, borrow them from the library, research them, quote from them, and re-read our favourites.

In 1992, the Wordsworth Classics series of paperback books was launched. Suddenly you could buy a new copy of a classic book for £1 (and they're still only £2.50 - £3.00 today). Foreign students would leap on them with cries of joy, expecting to read Conrad, Jane Austen or Daniel Defoe. They always left the shop without buying, because they soon realised that the text was too difficult. They could read them, but it wasn't fun. In fact, it was hard work. Wordsworth Classics are still popular, and they're still great, but they are hard to read if English is not your first language.

Language, culture and technology change over time. J. Meade Falkner wrote the adventure story Moonfleet in the 1890s, and it was a standard book in British schools for 80 years. Then it was quietly dropped because the English was getting a little too difficult for the classroom. Go back another 50 years to 1847, and Marryat's Children of the New Forest is really quite difficult for a lot of modern British readers.

When you read a true classic story today, it's not only great literature and fun to read, it's also pure time-travel. You are there in the past, and you share the writer's motivations and feelings.

Of course, a new adaptation of a classic book doesn't replace the original, but if it's about the same length as the original, and stays as close to it as possible, it can keep most of the original magic and still be accessible to students at Advanced (CEFR C1) level and above.

 

Publication date

When will you be able to buy Gradus Readers? Very soon; I have two collections (Miscellany One and Miscellany Two, a total of twenty short stories) ready for publication.

If you're a publisher, or you would like to be notified when the first books are published, please get in touch.

Miscellany One and Miscellany Two, front cover

Miscellany One and Miscellany Two, back cover