Simplified texts are commonly used by teachers and students in bilingual education and other language-learning contexts. These texts are usually manually adapted, and teachers say this is a timeconsuming and sometimes challenging task. Our goal is the development of tools to aid teachers by automatically proposing ways to simplify texts. As a first step, this paper presents a detailed analysis of a corpus of news articles and abridged versions written by a literacy organization in order to learn what kinds of changes people make when simplifying texts for language learners.