There are many authentic texts on internet that our students can benefit from but unfortunately many of them are far too difficult for our kids to understand specially if you are working with EFL students.
However, here is a great web tool that will help us to make texts more readable for our kids. Rewordify will help you to simplify a text or a website. Just copy and paste your text or the web link, click on “Rewordify” text! It will analyze the entire block of text—all at once—and finds all the hard words and phrases. Then, it simplifies with yellow highlights those hard words and phrases, helping learners understand the text. You can mouse over the highlighted words to see what the difficult word is. You can also go to settings and tailor it to your needs. You can get a permanent link for your text and share it with your learners.
When you are done, there are more activities that you can do with your text. You can print the list of the words with definitions or blanks. You can print a matching sheet, easy or a difficult quiz about your text.
This tool is great for teaching new vocabulary in a meaningful context.
Student can also use this web tool for themselves to copy and paste a text if the text is difficult.
You can put all the Rewordify links of the stories on somewhere and students can access them any time they like.
Here is a nice reading list with Rewordify links!
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cross-posted at ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org
Özge Karaoğlu is an English teacher and educational consultant in teaching young learners and teaching with web-based technologies. She is the author of Minigon ELT book series, which aims to teach English to young learners through stories. Read more of her ideas about teaching English through technology and Web-based tools at ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org.
