English is the most widely studied foreign language in the world, which means a learner who wants easy English has more choice than a learner of almost anything else. It also means half a dozen publishers with half a dozen incompatible level systems, sitting side by side on the same shelf. This guide explains what the levels actually measure, maps the main series onto the CEFR, and says plainly where the graded catalogue stops being useful.
What "graded" actually controls#
Three things are restricted in a graded reader, and they matter in this order.
Vocabulary is capped at a headword list. A 700-headword reader draws nearly every word from the 700 most frequent and useful words in English, plus proper nouns and a small number of glossed items. A headword covers its own family, so walk, walks, walked and walking count once.
Grammar is restricted to structures a learner at that level has studied. This is why low-level English readers stay in present and past simple and avoid the perfect tenses, conditionals and passive voice that appear everywhere in real English prose.
Sentence length is held down, and this does more for readability than the word list does. A sentence of nine words with one unknown in it is readable. A sentence of forty words with one unknown in it often is not.
A graded reader is therefore the opposite of a children's book. A book for a native six-year-old assumes thousands of spoken words and follows no grammar syllabus at all, so it is full of concrete nouns you have never studied and idiomatic verb phrases that no coursebook introduces. Graded readers are plain on purpose and comprehensible on purpose, and at A1 and A2 that is a trade worth taking.
The series you will actually find#
Oxford Bookworms Library (Oxford University Press) is the series most teachers reach for first. Seven stages from Starter to Stage 6, with stated headword counts, mostly adaptations of classic and modern fiction, plus a non-fiction line called Factfiles. Audio is available for much of the list.
Penguin Readers has the most confusing history. The series ran as Penguin Readers, was sold for much of the 2010s as Pearson English Readers, then relaunched under the Penguin Readers name around 2020 with a rebuilt eight-level structure labelled directly against the CEFR, from Starter to Level 7. Both generations are still circulating in libraries and second-hand, and their level numbers do not mean the same thing, so check which edition you have in your hand.
Cambridge English Readers is the unusual one: the fiction is original, written for the series rather than adapted from existing novels. That makes the plots less familiar and the prose less flattened, which is why the series tends to hold up better at intermediate level than a heavily cut adaptation. Seven bands from Starter to Level 6, with headword counts stated.
Macmillan Readers uses level names rather than numbers, from Starter through Beginner, Elementary, Pre-intermediate and Intermediate to Upper, with headword counts for each. The catalogue mixes retold classics with original stories. Availability varies by market now, so check the publisher's current list before committing to a whole band, and apply the same caution to Cambridge English Readers.
Black Cat / Cideb (Italy) publishes the Reading and Training and Green Apple collections, labelled by CEFR step and built for classroom use: audio, exercises, and background dossiers alongside the story.
Beyond these there are the Extensive Reading Foundation resources, which exist precisely because publisher levels disagree. The ERF maintains an independent grading scale across publishers and has run a Language Learner Literature Award, whose past shortlists are a reasonable place to look when you want a reader that is actually good rather than merely level-appropriate.
How the series levels map to CEFR#
Headword counts below are the publishers' own figures where they state them. The alignment between series is approximate and mine, not official, and publishers revise their charts, so treat a row as a neighbourhood rather than an equivalence.
| CEFR | Oxford Bookworms | Cambridge English Readers | Macmillan Readers | Penguin Readers (2020) | Approx. headwords |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | Starter (250) | Starter (250) | Starter (300) | Starter to Level 1 | 250–400 |
| A1–A2 | Stage 1 (400) | Level 1 (400) | Beginner (600) | Level 2 | 400–600 |
| A2 | Stage 2 (700) | Level 2 (800) | Elementary (1,100) | Level 3 | 700–1,100 |
| A2–B1 | Stage 3 (1,000) | Level 3 (1,300) | Pre-intermediate (1,400) | Level 4 | 1,000–1,400 |
| B1 | Stage 4 (1,400) | Level 4 (1,900) | Intermediate (1,600) | Level 5 | 1,400–1,900 |
| B1–B2 | Stage 5 (1,800) | Level 5 (2,800) | Upper (2,200) | Level 6 | 1,800–2,800 |
| B2–C1 | Stage 6 (2,500) | Level 6 (3,800) | — | Level 7 (tops out at B2) | 2,500–3,800 |
Two things fall out of that table. A "Level 4" means four different things depending on the spine, which is why the headword number is the only portable unit. And the top of the English catalogue, around 3,800 headwords, is roughly half of what unsimplified prose assumes. More on that below. If the letter codes themselves are new to you, CEFR levels explained covers what each band claims.
Choosing a level: the 98 percent check#
Ignore the cover. Open the book somewhere in the middle, read one full page, and count the words you cannot work out from context.
Nation's coverage research puts comfortable unassisted reading at roughly 98 percent of running words known (Nation, 2006), building on Hu and Nation's earlier comprehension work (2000). Ninety-eight percent of a 250-word page leaves about five unknown words. That is the target.
| Unknown words per 250-word page | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 0–2 | Below your level | Fine for speed and fluency, move up soon |
| 3–5 | About right | Get it, and line up three more at this band |
| 7–12 | A stretch | Workable with a dictionary, tiring over a whole book |
| 13+ | Too hard | Drop a band, whatever the label says |
Learners routinely choose one band too high, because the level on the cover flatters and the first page of a reader is usually the easiest page in it. Starting a band low costs you nothing: an easy reader is still reading volume, and reading volume is the whole mechanism. The reasoning behind that is in comprehensible input explained.
A1 to B1: read many, not well#
At the lower bands the single best instruction is quantity. The evidence for extensive reading, from Elley and Mangubhai's Fiji book-flood studies (1983) onward, is about how much you read rather than which titles you pick. One reader teaches you very little. Twenty readers at the right level rebuild your reading speed, and reading speed is what eventually lets you finish a real book.
So: pick a band, read five or six titles in it without looking anything up, then move up. Save the slow, careful, dictionary-in-hand treatment for short texts, and keep it separate from your reader habit. The two modes and what each is for are in intensive versus extensive reading.
Two free graded sources are worth adding alongside the books. VOA Learning English (United States) has written news in a core vocabulary of roughly 1,500 words, at slowed delivery, in some shape since 1959, so check whether it is still publishing before you build a habit on it. BBC Learning English (United Kingdom) publishes levelled news and language explainers. Between them you get daily graded input in both major written standards, which is useful because the spelling and some vocabulary differ. Check each site for what is currently available.
Where the English catalogue runs out#
Around B1 the supply narrows sharply, and this catches nearly everyone.
The reasons are structural. Publishers sell most copies at A1 and A2, so catalogues taper upward. The top bands stop between about 2,500 and 3,800 headwords, while Nation (2006) estimates 8,000 to 9,000 word families for unassisted reading of unsimplified written text. And the features that make a reader work at A1, namely short sentences and flattened syntax, become actively unpleasant at B1, when you have enough English to hear how thin the prose is.
That leaves a gap between the hardest graded reader and the easiest real English novel, and the usual advice to "just start reading native material" is in practice advice to grind through a book well below the coverage you need. Some people do it. Most abandon the book and conclude they cannot read English yet.
There are three honest ways across. Read easy authentic fiction written for young readers but not for infants: Charlotte's Web (E. B. White, 1952) and Holes (Louis Sachar, 1998) are short, plain and genuinely enjoyable. Roald Dahl is the usual next suggestion, but be warned that he invents words on purpose. Read genre fiction with high redundancy, where a thriller repeats its own vocabulary chapter after chapter. Or lower the book instead of raising yourself.
That last option is what LingoBlend does. Paste a chapter, an article or a page you already wanted to read, choose what share of the words get blended into English, and read it with the rest of the sentence supporting you. At a low percentage you are reading your own language with English woven through it. At a high percentage you are reading English with a safety net. Tapping a blended word gives its meaning and grammar, saving it puts it on a spaced-repetition schedule, and the Chrome extension blends the pages you already browse in your own language the same way. For an ordered path through the language, start with the English learning guide.
Keeping track of where you actually are matters more than the label on any reader, and how many words you know explains what a vocabulary count can and cannot tell you. The same level structure in other languages is in Spanish graded readers by level and French graded readers by level.