Why do we want students to read? What do we want students to get out of the stories and books that we ask them to read? In this presentation, two teachers –one Mongolian and one American- will discuss their working together in a Mongolian secondary school in Ulaanbaatar. They combined using an Xreading approach with students (where each student reads different texts at different levels and in different genres) and all students reading the same text together with activities to find common themes (resiliency, empathy and overcoming adversity) and homebased activities that involve parents with students’ emerging English learning and reading.