Reading Resources

The Academic Word Finder is a free electronic tool from Achieve the Core that quickly identifies academic words in copied and pasted texts. It is not intended to "replace teacher judgment; rather, it helps to support the teacher and identify the most useful academic words."

This game-like website asks questions and offers multiple-choice answers for eight subjects (Humanities, Math, Language Learning, Sciences, English, Chemistry, Geography, and SAT preparation) and multiple sub-topics.

This collection of instructional resources for the four components of reading is recommended by Minnesota STAR (STudent Achievement in Reading) and EBRI (Evidence-Based Reading Instruction) teachers. Resources are organized by the four reading components – alphabetics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension – and free and pay-for resources are included.

EAPFoundation.com offers a free electronic tool for finding, highlighting, and sorting academic words within texts. Their word source is the New Academic Word List or NAWL, a recent update of the Academic Word List or AWL. There is also the option of creating a simple, head word, or word family gapfill, where the found academic words become blanks in the text. 

EAPFoundation.com offers a free electronic tool for finding, highlighting, and sorting high-frequency words (of general service or everyday use) in texts. It includes 2801 words used frequently in both spoken and written English and serves as a foundational word list for deciding which highly used words are most important to teach.

For teachers serving beginning-level adult readers and working on vocabulary, this website provides a FREE source of sight word flashcards, games, lessons, and activities. All are focused on the Dolch Sight and Fry Instant lists; two collections of words that all beginning readers (at GE K-3) should recognize without sounding out letter by letter.

These “stellar” ideas for vocabulary instruction were collected from participating MN STAR administrators and teachers during 2009-2012.

Common vocabulary instructional challenges and solutions developed by Minnesota STARs and Trainers.

Fry's first 300 words presented in order of frequency and in simple phrases and sentences.

Academic word lists 1-10, presented in order from most frequent to least frequent usage across content areas.

This handout describes what STAR/EBRI volunteers “need to know” about evidence-based and explicit vocabulary instruction. It also clarifies how they can build or expand students’ Tier Two or academic vocabulary knowledge and usage.

This online vocabulary curriculum includes 38 lessons. Each lesson is focused on 5 Tier 2 (or academic) words and provides a Knowledge Rating Scale, definitions, synonyms/antonyms, examples, and guided practice activities. It is useful for Intermediate level students.

CrowdEd and Appalachian State University (ASU) have collaborated to make the original Vocabulary Lessons, which are now stored in a shared Google Drive as Google Docs. You can easily copy them over to your Google Classroom Drive and assign academic vocabulary lessons or activities directly to students. There's also now a direct Quizlet link so students can easily access additional interactive activities for each academic vocabulary lesson.

Tier 2 words are essential for ABE students to know in order to read and understand the academic language used in print or online text. For each Lesson in this curriculum, there are Teacher Notes for modeling, Student Activities for guided practice and application to context, and Teacher Answer Keys for checking. Each Unit also has a Review activity.

This vocabulary game is a companion resource for Units 1-4 of the Vocabulary Units curriculum. As students learn new words from each unit – or as a review of all – they can play the game to improve their knowledge and usage.

This evidence-based curriculum provides 60 workouts for the most common Tier 2 words from the Academic Word List. Each one-page, vocabulary workout presents a headword (e.g., analyze), 1-2 related words (e.g., analysis), parts of speech, definitions, contexts, conversation practice, and writing prompts.