The Bridge Series

The Bridge Series is intended for students of English as a second or foreign language who have progressed beyond the elementary graded readers and the Longman Simplified English Series but are not yet sufficiently advanced to read works of literature in their original form.

The books in the Bridge Series are moderately simplified in vocabulary and often slightly reduced in length, but with little change in syntax. The purpose of the texts is to give practice in understanding fairly advanced sentence patterns and to help in the appreciation of English style. We hope that they will prove enjoyable to read for their own sake and that they will at the same time help students to reach the final objective of reading original works of literature in English with full understanding and appreciation.

Technical Note

The vocabulary of the Simplified English Series is the 2,000 words of the General Service List (Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection) and there is a degree of structure control. In the Bridge Series words outside the commonest 7,000 (in Thorndike and Lorge: A Teacher's Handbook of 30,000 Words, Columbia University, 1944) have usually been replaced by commoner and more generally useful words. Words used which are outside the first 3,000 of the list are explained in a glossary and are so distributed throughout the book that they do not occur at a greater density than 25 per running 1,000 words.