In a parallel language environment it is important that teaching takes account of both the languages students areexpected to work in. Lectures in the mother tongue need to offer access to textbooks in English and encouragementto read. This paper describes a preliminary study for an investigation of the extent to which they actually do so.A corpus of lectures in English for mainly L1 English students (from BASE and MICASE) was examined for thetypes of reference to reading which occur, classified by their potential usefulness for access and encouragement. Suchreferences were called ‘intertextual episodes’. Seven preliminary categories of intertextual episode were identified. Insome disciplines the text is the topic of the lecture rather than a medium for information on the topic, and this categorywas not pursued further. In the remaining six the text was a medium for information about the topic. Three of theminvolved management, of texts by the lecturer her/himself, of student writing, or of student reading. The remainingthree involved reference to the content of the text either introducing it to students, reporting its content, or, really themost interesting category, relativizing it and thus potentially encouraging critical reading. Straightforward reportingthat certain content was in the text at a certain point was the most common type, followed by management of studentreading. Relativization was relatively infrequent. The exercise has provided us with categories which can be used for anexperimental phase where the effect of different types of reference can be tested, and for observation of the referencesactually used in L1 lectures in a parallel-language environment.