Aims:

The Reading Explorer series aims to develop learners' skills in reading, vocabulary building, and critical thinking, using topics and visuals adapted from real-world National Geographic content.

Principles:

A key principle of Reading Explorer is that today's learners need to be exposed to a wide variety of reading types. Information in the twenty-first century is increasingly conveyed in multimodal formats, that is, using a combination of text with graphics, diagrams, tables, photographs, and video. Exposure to the variety of formats in Reading Explorer will help learners to develop their visual literacy as well as their textual literacy.

Another principle of Reading Explorer is that fluent readers employ a variety of strategies for reading, which, in turn, is based on various purposes for reading. In other words, the reading process is often multipurpose.

An additional principle of the series is that reading is a multistage process. In particular, learners should be well prepared before they start to read a text and should later have an opportunity to reflect on what they have learned. This concept is known as the KWL technique.

Using this approach, students identify:

What they know about the topic

What they want to know

What they learned