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Creative Ways To Practice Reading Comprehension In A Languages Classroom
No matter what level of World Language class you teach, reading comprehension can be a challenging task for at least some students any one of your classes.
A block of solid text in any language can give some students anxiety. And for students who have had less than stellar preparation to get to the level of language that you are teaching, reading may be even more anxiety producing.
In order for students to get better at reading comprehension, they need to practice and they need to get rid of any associated anxiety. This means that as a teacher, you need to create a safe environment for students to take risks without negative consequences. This article will address a few creative strategies to set up a no-risk reading environment for a World Languages classroom.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Reading can be so much more interesting if students have some voice and choice in what happens in the story. This is why a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story can be so exciting. I like to use Google Forms to set up this activity. To set up the Form, you’ll need to branch it. This mean that what choice a student answers for one multiple choice question will determine what next set of text or question they will get. To see how to do this, Sylvia Duckworth has shared this document.
When text is put into a Choose Your Own Adventure activity, students will be reading in a low-risk environment, because nothing will be right or wrong. They will be reading the text to see what kind of ending they will get.
To get students to debrief this activity, you can put them into groups where all students who arrived at the same conclusion are in the same group. Then they illustrate on a large paper what happened in their story. If you link the Google Form to a Google Sheet, you will be able to see in the output which student made which choice. This way you can make sure students are appropriately grouped. Then to get students practicing speaking to each other, have them do the gallery walk activity that I described in this post in kinesthetic activities in a world languages classroom.
