Rewordify

As all good ESOL ninjas know, a surefire way to turn any student away from reading is ensuring that it is chock-full of difficult vocabulary.  I recently came across Rewordify, a website that searches for difficult vocabulary in either websites, pasted in text or the site's bank of texts and simplifies them into student-friendly terms.

While I find the site's layout to be a bit too basic and the fact that more than one vocabulary word is often provided in place of a more difficult term a bit confusing, it meets a need.  Overall, I would recommend it to students to use at home to independently complete complex reading assignments. Many of the difficult classic literature titles and public documents that secondary ESOL students struggle with are already available on the site and taking advantage of the modified texts can make the difference between a student actively engaging in or flunking an assignment.