A Story of Leveled Readers

In the summer of 2025, much in the adult education ELL world changed. There were seismic changes to funding and requirements for participation, making it ever more challenging for adult ELLs to access English learning opportunities. For educators working with beginner learners, we were already trying to gain our footing in response to a previous unexpected change…the disappearance of Bow Valley Readers (see ATLAS article).

Bow Valley College in Calgary, Alberta, Canada had long forged the way for providing outstanding resources for educators working with beginner adult ELLs, especially those considered “LESLLA learners” (with 6 years or less of formal education). These were available through the Bow Valley School of Global Access (site no longer available).

The benefits of the BV readers were many. For teachers with more than one student, teaching multiple levels is customary, and the opportunity to have students read stories at varying levels was transformational.

New levels for Pathway to Literacy stories

This summer, in partnership with Minnesota’s ABE Teaching & Learning Advancement System (ATLAS), Immigrant Welcome Center in Indianapolis was able to create more levels to stories in the 12 themes on their Pathway to Literacy website.

The Pathway to Literacy stories are generally available in 3 levels (A, B/C, and D), to correspond with the assessment and program levels. Using the Bow Valley readers’ higher levels as a guide, teachers created two more levels (E & F) for 15 stories in 12 different themes. These are available on the Theme-Based Stories tab of the website, as well as the Theme-based Lesson Planning. This expansion allows students to read the same story at varying levels, which enables teachers to differentiate learning while focusing on similar vocabulary and context.

An additional feature to the higher-level stories are sample test questions similar to those on the TABE Clas-E and CASAS assessments, providing students an opportunity to become accustomed to the test question format. The higher level readers are available for use in both online and in-person classes. Printable versions are linked below the online stories via the website. We are grateful for ATLAS investing in the story leveling project, and hope it will support practitioners who routinely used the Bow Valley readers in the past.

If you have any comments, suggestions for additional stories, or questions, please reach out to [email protected].