In my language courses, I'm really good at teaching grammar and conversation. What I suck at, paradoxically, is teaching reading. Even I am bored with my reading activities, so you can imagine how much my poor students suffer. All I can come up with in terms of fun reading activities is summarizing each paragraph in their own words and acting out scenes based on the reading. Which, yet again, turns into grammar and conversation activities.
Does anybody have any advice to offer? Any interesting activities that accompany reading short texts in the classroom?
9 comments:
Urge students to take a public speaking course or an acting course?
What level is your language course?
David: but I need to get them to read texts. It's not about pronunciation as much as it is about teaching them to keep their eyes on the page with a Spanish text.
Spanish prof: I suck at it on all levels. :-) Right now it's Intermediate II that I can't make it happen in.
At the Beginners level, I am as bad. At the Intermediate II, I would suggest some pre-reading activities, like questions that somehow relate to the topic of the text but that are broad enough so that you can start a class discussion based on them.
Then, close reading out loud (each student a few sentences, depending on the length of the text), and have one or two questions of reading comprehension after EACH paragraph. It breaks the monotony, makes them think about what they just read, and it's easier for them to understand the following texts.
I'm not going to say that it's the funniest activity they'll ever have, but I've had good results doing it. Still, reading comprehension is not a very enjoyable class activity for me.
It's my biggest problem too! Many students expect you to read the texts with them, which is very strange...
Ol.
Mine don't even expect anything. They just stare at me resentfully like I ate their grandma.
With reading it is possible to think up many any games. One of them: "Change the end". For example, read a fairy tale "Колобок" and the problem to change only one last offer so what to rescue колобка.
Here one of variants.
Колобок has jumped to a fox on a muzzle and has started singing the same song.
— Thanks, колобок! The nice song, still would listen! Sit down it on my tongue and sing in last just once, — the fox has told and has put out the tongue. Колобок foolishly нas jumped to it on tongue, its fox has bitten, yes tooth and has broken, because колобок has turned to a cracker (сухарь) while slid.
Interesting, cheerfully also it is useful
That really sounds interesting. Thanks!
I tried to post this a few days ago and kept getting an error and ran out of internet. So now I'm super late, but I promise it's a good activity and one of my favorites.
Jigsaw reading: you have 3 texts or 3 parts of a longer text (depending on your goals, and obviously it doesn't have to be 3 either). Each student reads one text and then summarizes/puts it in a graphical organizer/analyzes the viewpoint of this text. Then you put them in groups so each group is composed of someone who read a different text, and they have to complete a graphical organizer or do some sort of activity integrating the texts that requires the person who read it to explain/summarize it very well. This later part is more speaking, but it makes them refer to the text as well as know it well enough to explain it. I also second Spanish prof's pre-reading activities, which can be integrated for this. For example, I have an activity for beginners where they read the first few paragraphs of Wikipedia entries on three capital cities. Before they do this, I tell them they are going to read the Wikipedia entry on a city, what information do they think will be included. They come up with things like population, geography, etc, and I give them the vocab. Then they read about their city and fill out an organizer that includes things like location of city, age of city, population, famous monuments, economic resources, etc. Then they meet with their second group to fill in the same information for the other cities. At higher levels, obviously you can engage in more complicated thoughts, such as comparing and contrasting viewpoints or theories or something.
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