Resources for Reading
SkillsTutor Program
Comprehension
Vocabulary
Books Online
There is no educational skill more fundamental than reading. While it is well understood that people learn in many modes besides reading, printed materials are still the heart and soul of education. From research to textbooks to on-line materials, the printed word is the primary vehicle of education. The sites listed here provide practice in comprehension, vocabulary, and analytical reading. There are also special sections devoted to reading and studying textbooks and to reading Websites critically. Finally we provide a link to our list of free e-texts and literature on-line.
SkillsTutor is a fully interactive software package available to registered COD students. It offers instruction in reading, writing, and math. If you are enrolled in Reading 50 or 51, your instructor may have given you specific assignments for this software. However any COD student is welcome to use this software to brush up on vocabulary and reading comprehension. Click on the link below and follow the log-in instructions on the next page.
SkillsTutor Log-In
Web Guide to SkillsTutor
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The Reading Zone--From The English-Zone.com, by Kaye Mallory
Here you will find excellent reading exercises ranging from easy to advanced. Vocabulary items in each reading are linked to definitions, and every exercise has its own quizz.
Better English.Com--Web support for a textbook available from Pearson Brown
This site was created for students with English as a second language, and the focus is primarily on business English, but this site has more than 250 exercises. For comprehension skills, scroll down to Randals Listening Lab and E-Views, which provide challenging exercises.
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The Vocabulary Zone--From The English-Zone.com, by Kaye Mallory
This is a collection of vocabulary drills and quizzes for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. There are also printable vocabulary lists, vocabulary games, and links to other Web sites than focus on vocabulary skills.
Better English.Com--Web support for a textbook available from Pearson Brown
This site was created for students with English as a second language, and the focus is primarily on business English, but this site has more than 250 exercises. The first eight links all relate to improving vocabulary skills and lead to many interesting exercises.
FreeRice.com
"FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program. Our partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
FreeRice has two goals:
- Provide education to everyone for free.
- Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free."
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Okay, we went a bit over board here, listing several different sites, but we could not believe the deals we found as we searched this category. The sites below give you access to "e-texts," the entire texts of public domain books (books that are no longer under copyright). Fiction, poetry, non-fiction, reference books--thousands are free and available for download or printing or just to be read. Need the full text of Moby Dick, or Hamlet, or The Wizard of Oz? How about Crime and Punishment in the original Russian? It is all here. And the last two sites in our list offer new works of literature composed specifically for electronic media. Check it out!
The only thing we ask is that you not print any text in any College of the Desert lab. Many of these books run to hundreds of pages, and printing them ties up both the server and the printer in our labs.
The On-Line Books Page--John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania
This site created by the University of Pennsylvania offers an index of links to over 12,000 volumes covering poetry, fiction, history, religion, science, politics and many more topics all for free. Because most of these texts are located all over the Internet, there is no predicting how a particular text will be formatted. Search by author or title but not by subject. However, you can browse through an extensive Subject Catalogue that is organized according to the Library of Congress call numbers. Click on a subject in the catalogue and you are presented with a long list of links to books in that subject.
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts--Eric Lease Morgan, Infomotions, Inc.
Alex is a fascinating resource for e-texts. It only has materials covering Western philosophy, English literature, and American literature, but those holdings are extensive and very easy to use. Search initially by author, title, or historical period. Once the document is found, search the entire text by key word. You can download any item for use in a portable e-text reader, or download the entire Alex data base to your PC including the search engine for it. All for free.
Warning: downloading the entire Alex database is not allowed in any COD computer lab. Please do not tie up our servers. If you want the database, load it at home.
Project Gutenberg
Over 100,000 books and documents, 28,000 free E-text books. PG was one of the original efforts to put all of literature online for free. While most of their texts are in English, there is a considerable amount of material from other cultures and languages.
ManyBooks.net
This is another great source of free E-text books. Most of these books came from Guttenberg, but the interface for this site is much cleaner and easier to use. Most author names are linked out to Wikipedia, so you can quickly get biographical information on names you do not know. Lots of unexpected items too, like State of the Union addresses of American Presidents (Under Author, go Carter, Jimmy, for instance). Or look under Works Project Administration to find a list of Slave Narratives that were gathered by ethnographers in the 1940s.
Bartleby.com, Great Books Online
Bartleby does not have the largest selection of books available, but the easy-to-use interface and good search tools make it a pleasure to use. The site includes fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and reference works.
The Internet Public Library (IPL), Books Section--University of Michigan School of Information
The IPL Books Collection (formerly known as Online Texts) contains over 20,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification. They can also be searched using key words. This index links to many other literature archives on the Web. It is a relatively new site within IPL, and is still under construction, but with so many titles available, you have to look it over. Use their Help Page for instructions on searching the database.
eMule.com--The Poetry Archives
eMule is all poetry--Over 5,000 poems by over 150 poets. The texts are reproduced in a 10pt Ariel Unicode MS font that is hard to read on the Web page, but when printed or downloaded into Word they are quite readable. The site supports author, title, and subject searches by key word. There is also a large forum of discussion groups, information on authors, and interpretations for some poems.
eServer.org--A non-profit organization that is the collaborative work of many authors.
"The EServer is an arts and humanities e-publishing co-op based at Iowa State University where hundreds of writers, editors and scholars gather to publish over 35,000 works free of charge.The site is dedicated to clear, accessible writing in the humanities." Although it includes historical documents, many of its resources are new documents often written directly for eServer. Authors are encouraged to submit original works and have the option of editing and maintaining them. This site typifies a whole new wave of publishing on-line. Very trendy and interesting. Excellent full text topic searches available.
Electronic Literature Directory--Editors - Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, and Strickland
This directory focuses almost entirely on creative works of literature written directly for electronic media. They include hypertexts, interactive texts, kinetic or animated poems, reader collaborative literature, and other "new" media. Very nouveau. They only include traditional literary texts if they have been adapted to electronic media, for instance by adding a streaming audio of the work read aloud. Authors regularly add to and maintain these texts.
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