What is the difference between a basal reader and a graded reader?
Both basal readers and graded readers are books that contain simpler reading materials to help people develop reading skills. But what exactly is the difference between them?
Basal Readers Basal readers are textbooks used to teach reading and associated skills to schoolchildren. Commonly called "reading books" or "readers" they are usually published as anthologies that combine previously published short stories, excerpts of longer narratives, and original works.
A Basal Reader is a type of textbook that teaches reading skills in a specific order, assesses those skills, and provides coaching for those skills through several grade levels. Skills may be revisited many times with increasing complexity. This is also known as scaffolding.
What these definitions don't mention is that basal readers are intended for native speakers who are learning to read, typically children.
Basal readers, which are aimed at childeren, don't always make interesting reading for adults who are learning a foreign language.
2. Graded Readers
Graded readers, by contrast, are typically intended for people learning a foreign language, and therefore not necessarily for children.
Graded readers are "easy reading" books used to support the extensive reading approach to teaching English as a second or foreign language, and other languages. (...) Graded readers can be adapted from literary classics, films, biographies, travel books, etc., or they can be original works written at a less demanding language level. (...) Graded readers are written with specific levels of grammatical complexity in mind and with vocabulary that is limited by frequency headword counts.
Extensive reading or reading for pleasure is an excellent way of getting a lot of "comprehensible input" in a foreign language. Graded readers provide this type of comprehensible input.