New graded readers releases
Bjorn Fuisting
Ritsumeikan University
If you are looking for new readers for your younger learners for the fall semester, you are in luck. During the last six months, four new children's series have been brought to Japan by Macmillan LanguageHouse and McGraw-Hill Education, and activity books have been added to the Read and Imagine series from Oxford University Press. For older learners, there are fewer new offerings but newcomer Atama-ii Books are continuing add e-readers with 3 new Kindle titles and will have the first six titles available in paperback in November. There are also new titles from both Garnet Oracle Readers and New ELI Readers through englishbooks.jp, as well as two new titles in the recently launched Read Smart Readers series from Macmillan. Make sure to visit these publishers at the Educational Materials Exhibition at JALT2014 in Tsukuba in November.
Macmillan Children’s Readers
This series contains 6 levels with 53 titles and is originally aimed at L1 primary school children. It contains three different strands: fun stories that encourage students to read, culture stories from the English speaking world that both inform and entertain, and books that mix topic-based factual text with a fictional story on the same theme. The books are colourful and engaging, and if care is taken to match the level of difficulty and theme, they could work with older L2 students as well.
Macmillan English Explorers and Macmillan Explorers Phonics
These series contain an eight-level reading scheme, complemented by a four-level phonics scheme with 48 and 16 titles respectively. It is originally aimed for L1 children learning English in kindergarten and primary school but also has an edition for use in international classrooms. The series is supported with extra material and teaching notes available for free download. The nature of the stories and pictures together with the support material means these series could also be used with bilingual children to help them learn to read and write.
Joy Cowley Stories (McGraw-Hill Education)
This series brings 60 titles from the renowned and celebrated New Zealand children’s author Joy Cowley to Japan. As with many of these series that are originally written for L1 children, in this case kindergarten and early primary school students, they can be hard to use in the same way as graded readers since they are not graded in the same way, but the titles contain loveable characters and entertaining stories that would be a worthwhile addition to international schools and bilingual homes.
Correction: In issue 7.1 of ERJ we said that Read Smart Readers from Macmillan LanguageHouse was a non-fiction series. However, it contains both non-fiction and fiction titles such as the highly recommended Haircuts and Another Japanese Tale.
