New General Service List - Graded Reader (NGSL-GR)
New General Service List - Graded Reader 1.0
The NGSL-GR 1.0 (New General Service List-Graded Reader) is an extended version of our core list of general English words for second language learners, the 2809 word long New General Service List 1.2 (NGSL). The NGSL-GR (Browne & Culligan, 2024) was created to help teachers and authors who want to make graded reading content.
Currently there are more than 5000 graded readers published by more than 50 publishers with a range of just 50 words for the easiest level to about 3800 words at the most difficult level. Unfortunately, most of the word lists they use to create these materials are proprietary and not available to the public. To make matters worse, each publisher’s grading scale and naming protocols are different, making it hard for people running extensive reading programs to use books from more than 1 publisher. The Extenstive Reading Foundation addresses this second problem with what they call the “ERF Scale'' which puts all the books from all the publishers on a common scale. But the ERF Scale is not a wordlist and as we wanted to begin to write our own graded reading content based on the NGSL, we thought that by extending the NGSL from 2809 to 5000 words and then adding it to our NGSL Profiling Tool https://ngslprofiler.com/), it would be useful not only for our own projects but also to teachers and content developers wanting to use our word lists to create their own graded reading materials.
Most frequency lists on other profiling tools are offered in bands of 1000-5000 words which are far too large to be of much use for making graded reading materials. We therefore made 11 bands for the NGSL-GR, with 400 word bands for levels 1 through 8 and 600 word bands for levels 9 through 11.
You can download the NGSL-GR 1.0 below, and access it on the NGSL Profiling tool at https://ngslprofiler.com/. It is available for free via a Share and Share Alike Creative Commons license and all we ask is that you properly cite us (information at the bottom of this page). We hope it is of use to you!
NGSL-GR Downloadable Word List:
NGSL-GR 1.0 (headwords with frequency rankings) - coming soon
NGSL-GR Tools:
CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE
New General Service List - Graded Reader by Browne, C., and Culligan, B., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.charlie-browne.com