Reading & Vocabulary

Use this site for practicing reading skills. Choose from easier, medium, and harder stories. You can also choose reading material by clicking on the different subjects to read about, like health or family.

Practise your reading skills on ESL-Bits while listening to the audio link, to help with reading fluency and pronunciation. Choose the reading speed that works best for you. There are a variety of stories to choose from.

Go to the PET Reading Comprehension and Test Preparation website to find interactive activities will help you read and understand English and prepare for reading exams. Choose from 5 types of exercises: “Signs”, “Details”, “Matching”, “Gist” and “Gap”.

This site combines the world's smartest dictionary with an adaptive learning game that will have you mastering new words in no time.

Ask your instructor to sign you up for your own ReadTheory account, for your daily, fun "reading muscle" workout! You will also expand your general knowledge in the process - as each reading passage provides interesting facts about a variety of topics.

Use this website to read interesting, up-to-date newspaper articles in plain English.

Use this Online dictionary to look up words, improve your vocabulary, and improve your spelling. Another great way to keep on improving your language skills is to check this site on a daily basis and study the "Word of the Day".

Use the links in the student section in the middle of the Vocabulary Size web page and do the vocab test to find out how many words you know, or use the link to the free vocab game to learn more words and improve your vocabulary.

World news for students of English. Choose from many interesting articles and then choose the level of difficulty that will help you learn best. You can also read books while listening to the audio link, to help you with reading fluency and pronunciation.

You can read the latest news, choose the level of difficulty most comfortable for you, and practise listening, reading, spelling, vocabulary and grammar skills at the same time, all based on the reading passage you have chosen.

Reading skills

TV411 helps adult learners expanding and upgrading essential workplace skills. Follow this link if you want to concentrate on improving your reading skills.

This site offers free online articles at different levels. You can also listen to the text while reading to help you practice reading. Choose from a slow and a normal reading speed. There are also extra material like exercises and quizzes available to help you learn.

The Merriam Webster English Dictionary Online is a good dictionary to use. It has a built-in thesaurus, word sounds, and games to play. Learn the Word of the Day to improve vocabulary. You can also break up words into syllables with an English pronunciation.

CommonLit is a free collection of fiction and nonfiction if you want something more challenging. Ask your instructor to provide you with a username and password to use this site. Note to instructors: Sign up as instructor here . Search and filter the collection to find suitable material for individual learners.

Find free classic books online by clicking on the image above. There are many beloved titles for all ages to enjoy, - from children's stories like The Jungle Book, Dracula, Anne of Green Gables, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to stories for all ages such as A Christmas Carol, The Secret Garden and The Arabian Nights! To visit the main website of Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, click here.

The NYT Learning Network is a good source to use for reading interesting articles about the world around you, while at the same time practising how to think about, understand, talk and write about things you read, all while strengthening your literacy skills and creative thinking. For higher learners, best to use with an instructor or tutor.

Newsela offers free learner accounts for people who are 13 years or older. You can sign up with a gmail account. There are a variety of recent and interesting articles available to read at different levels. It also has a "Speak" feature that allows for the text to be read out loud.

Do you want 5 letter words with double vowels spelled with a and two consonants, or six letter single syllable double vowel words? What a word search! With You Go Words!, you can find just that kind of words list and names too. Score big playing Words With Friends®, Scrabble® and other word games. You Go Words! is the best and most accurate easy to use AtoZ word finder around, with an unscrambling tool to solve word puzzles and find answers for games such as 4pics1word, Words With Friends, Jumble, 94% Words Cheat and more.

Find dozens of story phonic lessons for learners who are just learning how to read at this contextual phonics program site. These stories are part of a contextual phonics program created by Marn Frank, M.Ed. with the support of LDA of Minnesota, The site also includes a reading skills test for preliterate students, alphabet and number flash card exercises, word and number bingo, calendar exercises, and phonics exercises to teach students the sounds of letters and basic sound rules, like short and long vowels.

Teach Your Monster to Read is an award-winning series of games, covering skills from learning to read letters and sounds to reading full sentences. The computer version of these games is 100% free, with the downloadable apps for Android or Apple being a paid version. Although designed as a game to engage young children, it can be used as a valuable learning tool for emerging readers of all ages, if explained by the tutor in context.

The Phonics Bloom website offers different levels of interactive online phonics games to help teach learners the relationship between letters and sounds, and develop the skills needed to read and write. The website offers both a free and a paid version.

This website (also known as Fly with Phonics), developed by Blake Education, is a free online reading program to accommodate all types of learners:- visual, auditory and kinesthetic. The program covers the 42 phonemes that make up the English language, which is essential for reading fluency. The program focuses on building skills in phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition and fluency. It allows each student to work at his or her own pace, with or without tutor assistance. Workbooks can be downloaded. Print Concepts

Fun Fonix is a phonics warehouse of resources and materials that are designed to move quickly through phonics rules. These are ideal for tutors with limited time for phonics instruction or who need additional materials for learning and practice. The worksheets and workbooks can be downloaded for use. The links to the interactive phonics games are unfortunately disabled, as it requires Adobe Flash Player.

Free Phonics offers lessons designed to teach new learners to read by building a phonics-based foundation. The beginning reader can use the consonant charts and the vowel charts to learn the basic sounds and spelling of letter combinations. Unfortunately, the interactive picture charts rely on Adobe Flashplayer and are therefore not functioning anymore. Go straight to the "Lessons" section of the webpage.

The FreeReading website provides a library of activities and resources for early literacy development. A 40-week teaching tool (5 days per week, 30 minutes per day) helps tutors to use explicit, sequential, and systematic instruction activities to help learners build, develop, and reinforce foundational literacy skills.

It is the basic right of every person to be able to read. Learning to read by using phonics is an easy way to master reading skills. The tried and trusted Step by Step phonics programme by Mrs Mona McNee is now available online free of charge. It's straightforward, easy to follow and suitable for all ages. It is VERY important not to skip a single lesson. Start with the introduction and work your way through.

Ultimate Phonics software, developed and distributed by Spencer Learning helps beginning and struggling readers of all ages to be accurate, fluent readers with higher comprehension. You can try the software free of charge for a limited time, after which you will have to buy the software. Tutors can also download Ultimate Phonics Word Lists and Sentences here .

Go to this website to find interactive phonics worksheets to complete. You can also watch short video clips to help understand the different sounds in English.

Fast-paced and FUN! Improve your reading skills by mastering phonics! A free, basic phonics tutorial with audio narration and clickable words to learn phonics. It includes rules for vowels, consonants, and blends along with practice pages. The common word practice section is also helpful. . Note: the audio needs Flash to play.

Sightwords is a good website to use for tutors with emerging readers. Dolch and Fry high-frequency word lists can also be downloaded and printed from this site. Combining sight words with phonics instruction increases speed and fluency in reading.

Spelling Words Well equips professionals, teachers, and learners of all ages to become impeccable spellers. On the webpage, use the tabs on the left or the links below to find the resources your need. You can also find some sight words and phonics activities on this site.

Create your own spelling and vocabulary lists on AAASpell to practice, or use any of the lists already created by other users. Practice makes perfect! Click on the image above to visit this site.

The Free Cozy Spelling Course is a 36-week, text- and audio-based learning plan that teaches the spelling of 600 words. At the end of the course, there's an option to print out a course completion certificate. The course is based on the spelling courses the late Marie Sophia Rackham taught during her English teaching career in Campbell River, BC.

This is an excellent free reading instruction site, with online reading instruction for beginner to advanced levels. Reading tutors can create a free account and register their students, then create individual assignments, with non-fiction passages available in various levels of difficulty, audio accompaniment, etc.). All resources can be printed.

Do you like listening to audiobooks? This website offers many options for downloading and listening to free audiobooks. There are many titles to choose from, with new titles being added all the time. LibriVox is a non-profit organisation with a vision to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

Practice your reading skills with Marshall Adult Education. On the website, scroll down the page to choose your level, then choose a story. When you click on the story, you will see some pre-reading questions and a link to to the story. You can listen to the story on the second reading. After reading the story three times, answer some questions and do the writing activity. There are no answers on the website.

1. For lighter workouts, click on this link.

2. For heavier workouts, click on this link.

Whether you want to practice reading basics, or take next steps in reading, use this site to practice and improve your reading skills. Reading Skills for Today's Adults offers audio at 3 speeds and reading passages starting at basic level and many more steps to help you climbing up the ladder of reading fluency.

This site is similar to Reading Skills for Today's Adults, but the reading passages are aimed specifically at improving reading skills of people who work / want to work in the healthcare industry. Click on the image above to visit.

At LiveWorksheets you will find many interactive reading comprehension worksheets, including phonics practice worksheets and video clips, sight words and cvc words to help beginner readers cement reading skills. Click on the image above to visit.

Word games are enjoyed by millions of people all over the globe. Find all kind of word puzzles, like crossword puzzles, word searches, and even different kind of puzzles like Buzzwords, Zigzags and Triangulair ! There are nearly 350 free pages of puzzles and word games on this site for your enjoyment and even to build your word skills. Use the tabs on the left to find the categories you need.

Do you like reading inspiring or even just funny quotes? Do you sometimes look for a good quote to include in your writing? Wikiquote is a free online compendium of sourced quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information. Click on the image above to go to the main website.

E-reading Worksheets - a website created by a language teacher, Mr. Morton - provides teachers, parents, and learners of all ages with free, high-quality reading worksheets, activities and resources, covering a broad range of reading, writing and language art skills. The website also has a growing collection of online reading activities.

The Free Reading Program is a free online literacy program for early readers and ESL learners. It includes over 3600 online interactive Reading, Spelling and Grammar lessons for foundational to level 6 learning. Start learning at any level and progress to the next level when you feel confident. You will have to create a free account to get access to the program, by only providing your email address, country and province, and first language.

If you like seeing pictures of things you are learning, this website is a great tool to use. This visual online dictionary has 15 themes with over 6,000 images to help you see the meanings of different words. (By the way... this link also provides access to a Spanish and a French visual dictionary if you are interested in learning these languages!

Use Macmillan Dictionary to find meanings, pronunciations, synonyms, collocations, idioms as well as images, videos and sound effects. Browse BuzzWords and the crowdsourced Opensource Dictionary. Improve your English with games, quizzes and helpful resources for teachers and students, such as videos about grammar, vocabulary and English around the world.

East of the Web is a website where you can find a variety of printable short stories, word games and lots of opportunities for interactive learning.

The Canadian Encyclopedia is a beautiful encyclopedia with a youth section, quotes, "This Day in History", picture galleries, games, quizzes and interactive activities.

THE WORLD’S #1 ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA Search over 200 individual free encyclopedias and reference books, newspaper and magazine articles, and regularly updated featured topics from the worlds most trusted publishers.

Rhymezone is an online rhyming dictionary. Visit this site to find rhymes, synonyms, adjectives, and more. It's a good resource to expand your vocabulary, to use as a writing resource to write lyrics for songs, and to have language fun! You may even discover you're a poet,... and you didn't know it!

Newspapers

This site has free copies of online newspapers that you can download to your own computer or laptop to read. If you are working with a tutor, there are also lessons and teacher's notes available to use these newspapers as lessons to practise and improve your reading and language skills.

Vocabulary

TV411 helps adult learners expanding and upgrading essential workplace skills. Follow this link if you want to concentrate on building your English vocabulary.

if you need to find out basic facts about something and don't want to spend too much time reading about it, read an infographic. Click on the image above to visit the Daily Infographic website and learn new things about all kinds of interesting topics. If you want to find out more about this visual digital information (data visualization) tool, click here . To read more about different tools available for creating infographics, read this article.

This interesting site provides much more than just a dictionary to look up the meanings of words! It also includes online spelling tests, quotes and articles relating to the date, and lots more interesting links like games, an encyclopedia, idioms, a thesaurus, and even an English Grammar book that you can use to improve your writing skills!

The Old Farmer’s Almanac was first published in 1792. It is North America’s oldest continuously published periodical, and comes out every year by September. The words of the Almanac’s founder, Robert B. Thomas, still summarises this magazine: “Our main endeavour is to be useful, but with a pleasant degree of humor.” It is filled with fun facts, useful information and interesting articles, and is now also available as a digital magazine on this website.

Looking for free e-books to read? Go to the ManyBooks website and explore a catalogue of free, public domain e-books to download. A hidden treasure of reading delight is waiting to be discovered!

Reading

Whether you want to learn new words, practice reading, or review those grammar rules you forgot over the years, this interactive program is for you.

The K-12 Reader website offers free, printable worksheets to improve spelling, reading skills, vocabulary and also grammar and writing skills. Different levels are available to suit your learning needs. The worksheets are unfortunately not interactive, so you will need to print the sheets.

The Online Etymology Dictionary is not a dictionary in the normal sense of the word. This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. If you are interested in the history of how words came to have the meanings they do, this is a good website to visit.

Visit Rotten Tomatoes to find reviews about movies and TV shows. A panel of professional film critics upload their reviews and mark their reviews "fresh" if it's generally good, or "rotten" otherwise. The website calculates the percentage of positive reviews, and if it is 60% or more, the film is considered "fresh". If less than 60%, the film is considered "rotten". A short excerpt of the review is quoted with each film, that also serves as a hyperlink to the complete review.

Go to the IMDB website to find information about movies, TV shows, awards, ratings and reviews, and your favourite actors. Watch trailers of both old and soon to be released movies, and even get recommendations on what movies or TV shows to watch.

If you are one of those people who REALLY enjoy talking about the weather. visit the SciJinks website - it's all about the weather! Learn more about the jetstream, how snowflakes form, how to read a weather map, types of clouds, how lightning forms, what causes droughts and many other fun facts.

Visit 3D Geography if you want to find interesting Geography facts, fun worksheets and puzzles, learn how to read maps, learn about different countries, the weather, climate regions, landforms and even how to build geography models.

Wonderopolis is the ideal website for you, if you like reading about "weird" stuff like "CRISPRs" (yes, it is a thing!) and finding out new facts about everything in the world around you, from questions like "Who was Elvis Presley?", to "What are earthquake lights?", and even "What happens to sugar when it dissolves?" this is the place for you. Click on the link above to start your journey!

World Atlas is an educational geography website that has been online since 1994! It is a great website with original maps, charts, tables, lists, graphs and interesting articles for anyone interested in our world and the amazing people, places and animals on it. Topics include sociology, demography, environment, economics, politics, and travel. Click on the image above to visit the site.

YourDictionary is an easy-to-use dictionary, with lots of tools and resources to help you choose your words precisely, avoid usage pitfalls, and be confident in your use of grammar. It provides simple definitions of words, helps with pronunciation, and can even help you with building your grammar skills. It is also a great reference site to add to your knowledge of words and grammar. It has a link to a thesaurus, and also a games section where you can build your vocabulary. Click on the image above to visit the site. Tutors can also find valuable teaching tools here.

Kiddle Encyclopedia (Kpedia), powered by MediaWiki. is an online encyclopedia aimed at children. It lists over 700,000 articles, and is based on selected content and facts from Wikipedia, rewritten for children. It is intended as an educational resource to be used for "school homework help and general education, and includes their articles in search results. The first three search results listed is considered safe and written specifically for kids, with the next four being safe sites not written specially for kids, but presented in kid friendly language. The eighth result and anything else beyond are safe sites written for adults but harder to understand for kids. If the user enters what are considered "bad words" a picture of a robot is displayed, telling the user to try again To visit, click on the banner above.

Best of the Reader is a free website, funded by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills & Training, offers a series of e-books for adult literacy and ESL learners. This site has 15 e-books, a teachers’ guide, and a calendar of special days and holidays.

Each e-book has 8 to 10 stories, and each story has exercises and activities to go with it. There is also an answer key in each e-book. The stories, recipes, puzzles, and other material are from past issues of The Westcoast Reader (1982-2009), a newspaper for adults who are improving their English reading skills.

WordHippo is an online Thesaurus and word tool for all your creative writing needs. You can find rhyming words, synonyms and antonyms, example sentences, translations, word definitions, word forms and word game helpers on this site. To visit, click on the banner above.

Civix Digital Information Literacy initiative aims to support tutors in empowering learners with the knowledge and skills required to locate the information they can trust, to enable them to make informed choices. The aim is to educate and encourage learners to routinely evaluate sources and claims and to know where to look for reliable information.

This website also links up with another great Civix digital Information literacy resource, CTRL-F, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Reader's Digest is a popular. printed magazine, filled with interesting articles on a wide variety of topics. If you feel like browsing through a magazine to find something interesting to read, try this site for informative online articles. Click on the image above to visit the website.