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An introduction to Oxford Reading Buddy

by | Aug 5, 2022 | News, Schools

Oxford Reading Buddy is a digital reading service to help your students to develop important skills in reading and to encourage them to read more. 

It contains hundreds of digital books from Oxford University Press’s well-known reading series – all matched to your student’s reading level. It offers special Coaching eBooks to develop comprehension.

Coaching eBooks

Oxford Reading Buddy features a new set of books called Coaching eBooks which are specially written to develop the key skill of comprehension. The Coaching eBooks contain a Reading Buddy, a fun friendly character who your students can choose themselves and who prompts and models specific comprehension strategies. Your student’s buddy will also ask questions and give tailored feedback.

Quizzes

At the end of every book is a quiz which children should try to complete on their own. Their results will be sent to the teacher so that they can track the student’s progress against key comprehension skills. Children can also take quizzes on Oxford print books. When you’re the student has met certain quiz-result thresholds they will be moved up to the next Oxford Level.

Oxford Reading Levels

All the books and quizzes on Oxford Reading Buddy are carefully levelled according to Oxford University Press’s levelling structure, Oxford Reading Levels. This means that the books to which the student has access will have just the right amount of support and challenge to ensure that they can read successfully, build confidence and make progress. There are 21 Oxford Reading Levels which take students all the way from when they first begin to read up to becoming ready for secondary school.

A variety of factors determine the level of a book including phonic knowledge, vocabulary, sentence length, number of words on a page and use of illustrations. The maturity of the content is also considered, as well as how much comprehension and inference a book asks the reader to do. In Oxford Reading Buddy students move through levels automatically based on the numbers of books read and quiz scores achieved.

Comprehension skills and strategies

Comprehension is the most important aspect of reading once basic decoding skills have been grasped. Oxford Reading Buddy helps your child to learn vital comprehension skills and strategies.

The Reading Buddy in the Coaching eBooks encourages your child to actively use comprehension strategies during reading to help them understand a text. There are seven key strategies and they are:

Badges

Your child may earn badges for good reading behaviour, such as doing well in a quiz or listening to the Reading Buddy Prompts in the Coaching eBooks. You can see a record of the badges your student has earned for each Oxford Level they have completed by selecting Badges at the top of the screen.

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