Graded readers are believed to be extremely useful for learners of English. Many research reports show that learners improve substantially if they read a lot of simplified books. In this post, I would like to share a Graded Reader Comic. It is a Sherlock Holmes story called The Final Curtain. The comic is just six pages long and is suitable for elementary and pre-intermediate learners of English.
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Sherlock Holmes – The Final Curtain – Graded Reader
I took the original comic, improved the quality of the pictures and simplified the dialogues. You can download and print the graded reader here:
If you prefer video, you can watch the video of the comic here. There is no sound but you can ask your students to read the bubbles aloud.
Graded Readers – research
At the end of the period, I gave the students the Level Vocabulary Test by Paul Nation and then my colleague gave the same test to another group of 10-year-olds who study the same textbook. My group knew 10% more words than the control group, but the other group scored better in a grammar test. So, I am not convinced that graded readers are the best thing. But as they do not harm my students, I will keep on using them.
If you are interested in more research on graded readers, you can find it here.
Some posts are easy to write and some take a lot of time to create. This one is the latter case. It took me three months to draw and rewrite the Sherlock Holmes story for pre-intermediate students.
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In this post, I would like to share with you a graded comic called Sherlock Holmes – Diamond Secret. The original comic is published by digitalcomicmuseum.com under CC0 license. I took the original story and copied only the outlines and I simplified the dialogues. You can read the resulting story here.
Sherlock Holmes – vocabulary
The correct answers are here:
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1. Secret
2. Anchor
3. Smuggler
4. customs
5. expect
6. diamond
7. wonder
8. button
Sherlock Holmes – video
I made the comic black and white to make it simple to print. I know it does not look as well as in colour, but it is much cheaper to print enough copies for the whole class.
You can download the pdf file here:
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Sherlock Holmes – pdf file [/sociallocker]
A few words on reading
By working on speed reading, your students will improve their speed of reading and they will improve their comprehension. I play the video first in the speed it is, then I increase the speed to 150% and I ask the students to read the story again and I play it at 200% speed.
Extensive reading is a perfect means of refreshing vocabulary knowledge and creating collocations in one“s mind.