At the Texas Woman’s University to talk about graded readers, cultural familiarity, and what happens when the books meant to help you read seem to have been written for somebody else entirely.
Texas, meanwhile, is now firmly leading my personal conference league table with four appearances. Everything is bigger here, apparently, including the brisket barbecue.
Back home, or
into the footnotes?
The Event
- Conference
- Learning without Barriers: Empowering Students through OEP/OER
- Hosted by
- * Texas Woman’s University;
- Where & when
- Texas Woman’s University — 2 April, 2026
- Official Links
- * Texas Woman’s University
Research summary - Shelves for Someone Else’s Household
Graded readers – books written or adapted for different levels of English – help learners build language proficiency. But their stories do not always connect with the people reading them. Many draw on Western classics and detective fiction, filling their pages with country houses, drawing-room mysteries and unfamiliar social conventions. For young adults in Southeast Asia, these books can feel like shelves stocked for someone else’s household. Reading becomes a double challenge: understanding the language and making sense of the cultural assumptions behind it.
In Thailand, this mismatch sits alongside a clear appetite for fiction. Young readers turn eagerly to digital platforms for slice-of-life stories, romance and realistic accounts of encounters between cultures, yet find few equivalents in materials designed to teach English. I propose original light novels for elementary to intermediate learners (A2–B1), freely available under Creative Commons licences and distributed through the digital platforms these readers already use. Their stories centre on the tensions and discoveries of encounters between Eastern and Western cultures. The guiding principle is simple: they must work as compelling fiction. Carefully selected vocabulary and manageable sentence structures make the language accessible without turning the story into an overt lesson.
Each novel includes a cultural glossary that explains more than unfamiliar words. It acts as a map between cultures, helping readers understand references and assumptions on both sides of the encounter. The goal is to invite cultural exploration alongside language learning. Designed around the interests of Thai readers, the model offers a basis for developing English-learning fiction in other settings where available books fail to connect with learners’ lives.