How to Generate Adaptive Reading Passages From Any Text With AI

Adaptive reading passages can help you provide personalized learning experiences to your students, but creating them remains a challenge due to their dynamic nature. In case you’ve wondered if it’s possible to solve this challenge with AI, the answer is “Yes”.

How so? That’s what you’ll learn here. With the methods outlined in this post, you’ll be able to quickly generate adaptive reading passages and make the process repeatable, significantly improving your current workflow.

Questions to consider when creating adaptive reading passages

Regardless of the tools you use to prepare any reading passage, you probably consider several things:

Topic or subject: What should the passage be about (e.g., history, science, literature)?

Your students’ reading level: Are your students beginners, intermediate, or advanced readers?

Length: How long should the passage be? (Typically 150-300 words for younger students, 400-600 words for older students)

Purpose: What skills are you targeting? (e.g., comprehension, vocabulary, critical thinking)

These considerations help you decide on the type of content you’d expect in your reading passages. Now, the same considerations apply to adaptive reading passages, too, but the process comes with a new layer of complexity. The reason is, you have to take into account a few more aspects:

Curriculum: What curriculum expectations is the passage going to meet?

Adaptability: How customizable will the passage remain as your students’ reading ability improves?

Reusability: How else can you use the passage in your overall workflow? (e.g., to create worksheets or presentation slides)

Repeatability of the process: How consistently and quickly can you prepare similar reading passages? (e.g., for other classes)

Addressing these concerns can help you come up with a reliable framework.

Worry not. Theoretical frameworks aren’t the focus of this tutorial. Instead, let’s take a look at an AI-powered adaptive reading passage generator. After that, you’ll also get to learn about the traditional prompting method.

The adaptive reading passage this tutorial will cover

Here’s what we’re going to do.

We’ll generate an adaptive reading passage based on Herman Melville’s work ‘Moby Dick; Or, The Whale’. The first chapter of the novel, to be specific.

According to Project Gutenberg, where we have collected the chapter text from, this novel is appropriate for 7th grade students. Let’s specify our requirements a bit more.

We want our passage to have approximately 300 - 400 words. Using this passage, we want to help a cohort of 7th graders understand the first chapter better.

In your real-life exercise, you’ll probably create such a passage along with your lesson plan or worksheets, but that’s out of the scope of today’s tutorial.

How to create adaptive reading passages with Monsha

This is the most intuitive way to do it. You'll see why in a moment.

1. Navigate to Monsha and sign up or log in. (Signing up takes only a few moments)

2. After logging in, you'll see a list of different types of resources you can make—worksheets, presentations, and more. Select Adaptive Reading Passage.

3. The screen you’ll be taken to will give you the option to assign your reading passage to a course, unit, or lesson. We’ll skip it for now, but it’s how you can easily keep your resources organized if you plan your curriculum in Monsha.

4. This is where the most interesting part begins. You can use different sources to create reading passages, including a topic of your choice, file uploads, and YouTube videos. You can even use multiple sources at once!

Considering our requirements, we’ll use the “Any text or excerpt” option. Let’s copy-paste the text we collected.

5. The next configuration screen is probably the most important part for you. With the options available here, you can specify your requirements here just by clicking on what you need.

These are our selections:

Grade: Grade 7

Approximate length of the passage: 300 - 400 words

Now, instead of generic simple/intermediate/advanced levels, you can adapt your reading passage to specific well-known frameworks:

• Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Levels
• Lexile Reading Levels
• Bloom’s Taxonomy

Since our goal is to help our students understand better, let’s go with Bloom’s Taxonomy (Understand).

If you want to be more specific, provide additional instructions, but this step is optional. For example, you can instruct Monsha to specify the tone of the passage.

6. Click Generate and receive your adaptive reading passage. It will take only a couple of seconds! This is what we got:

How Monsha stands out from other reading passage generators

Most reading passage generators can give you blocks of text that are pretty usable in random settings. There’s no doubt about that. However, all teaching-focused tools offered by Monsha are designed to improve your workflow and save you hours. The adaptive reading passage generator is no exception.

Edit your reading passage: After generating the passage, add rich content like images, tables, and more. You don’t have to start from scratch to make the output perfect.

Customize your passage fast: Whether you want to shorten your passage or change the tone, you can do it using the Quick Actions feature. This alone can save you a lot of time since you don’t have to make any manual edits.

Differentiate for different groups of students: As you’ve seen in this exercise, it’s possible to configure your reading passage based on grade level, DOK levels, Lexile reading level, or Bloom’s taxonomy. You can use this feature even after your passage is generated. So you can actually create multiple versions of the same resource for different cohorts of students. This offers a great way for you to incorporate differentiated instruction with AI.

Export your passage in your preferred format: Save or share your passage as a DOC, PDF, Google Doc, or other formats.

Create more resources based on the passage: If you need comprehension questions or worksheets based on your passage, you can easily generate them with a few clicks.

By the way, you can easily access every reading passage you generate via your Monsha account. The same goes for other teaching materials. So this can truly be your one-stop tool.

Generating adaptive reading passages with AI chatbots

Good outputs from general-purpose AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini come down to one thing.

Extensive prompting.

The more you can fine-tune your prompts, the better the outputs. That’s why you’ll need teaching-focused prompts. With that in mind, try out the following templates to generate adaptive reading passages. Feel free to modify them based on your requirements.

Prompt template example for a simple informative passage

"Generate a [reading level] reading passage about [topic]. The passage should be around [word count] words and contain key facts about [specific details of the topic]. The language should be [easy/medium/hard], and it should be engaging for [grade level / age group]."

An actual prompt based on this template would be:

"Generate a beginner reading passage about the water cycle. The passage should be around 150 words and contain key facts about evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. The language should be easy and engaging for 4th-grade students."

Prompt template example for a narrative passage

"Write a short, engaging story about [topic/idea]. The story should be [word count] words and have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Provide descriptions of the characters and include some dialogue between them. The language should be [reading level] and targeted at [grade level / age group]."

You can tweak this template slightly and use the following prompt:

"Write a short, engaging story about a lost puppy finding its way home. The story should be around 200 words and have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Include some dialogue between the puppy and a friendly stranger. The language should be simple and targeted at 2nd-grade students."

Prompt template example for passages with complex sentence structure

"Write an advanced-level reading passage for [grade level / age group] students about [topic]. The passage should be [word count] words long and use terms like [term 1, term 2, term 3, …]. Include detailed explanations and multiple examples for the terms. Make sure the passage is appropriate for students who are proficient readers.”

And this would be an actual example:

"Write an advanced-level reading passage for 8th grade students about climate change. The passage should be 400 words long and use terms like 'greenhouse gases,' 'carbon footprint,' 'fossil fuels’. Include detailed explanations and multiple examples for the terms. Make sure the passage is appropriate for students who are proficient readers.”

You still have to call the shots

Once you have your AI-generated adaptive reading passages, you need to review them to ensure they meet your students’ needs. So check whether or not the language is appropriate for the intended reading level. Or, if the passages can hold your students’ attention. Or, if the passages need further editing.

As you can see, AI tools can reduce the time it usually takes to prepare reading passages, but most of them still require detailed prompts. On the other hand, a dedicated teaching tool like Monsha makes the process of adapting your reading passages easy, repeatable, and reliable. So the next time you want to improve your workflow, create your teaching materials with Monsha.