This is an open textbook that has been more than five years in the making. Each chapter includes an activity to activate prior knowledge and gain interest, a reading, vocabulary building exercises, and comprehension and critical thinking questions. Each unit ends with a final essay assessment that aligns with the content and objectives of the text. An instructor's guide is included, with suggestions for different approaches and activities. An answer key is currently being created, crowd-sourced by other instructors and students who are using the textbook.

Rationale

My open textbook showcases years of iterative work to design a learning experience that can be accessed and used freely by instructors around the world. I carefully chose and sequenced each unit, organizing stories by culturally universal themes. As I teach in an organization that focuses on academic readings, I made connections between the literature and real concepts found in more academic texts and ensured vocabulary that the learner encounters will be from the Academic Word List. I used an English corpus to adapt public domain texts for some of the readings and analyzed the text to determine CEFR reading levels so that instructors and students would know the difficulty of the reading.  I sequenced chapter activities and assessments according to Bloom's Taxonomy, going from lower-order thinking with comprehension questions and moving to higher-order thinking with critical thinking questions. My key takeaway is the importance of iteration and using instructor and student feedback to improve future versions.