Reading Stations in the Foreign Language Classroom

Students need to engage with a text to truly understand the themes, concepts, vocabulary and structures.  Reading comprehension questions don’t provide much engagement with text.  Here are some ideas for creating reading stations for your foreign language students.  These are activities that require students to engage with the text and make meaning.  These are general activities that can be modified to fit various reading proficiency levels.

HERE are some Spanish Reading passages that work well with these activities.

Station 1: Photos

• Students arrange photos chronologically according to the text.

Sentences (individual or in small groups)

• Students  arrange sentences chronologically according to the text. They should not be sentences taken directly from the text, but rather use different words.

Match Photos with Vocabulary (individual or small groups)

• Students have a number of words from the story (familiar and new) as well as a picture representation of each word.

Station 4: Bingo in a Bag (small groups)

• Students take a blank bingo card and fill in words that you give them.  All students have all of the answers to questions that you will put in a bag, but their boards will be different.
  
• Students take a question (about the text) out of a bag and mark the answer on their bingo card. Play continues around with each player taking turns and adding the question back into the bag.
  
• When a student gets 4 in a row, the teacher verifies and the student is declared the winner.

Drawing (individual or in small groups)

• Students use pencils, markers, or crayons to draw a storyboard for the story

Writing

• Given a choice, students will compose a written piece. They should have a number of options to choose from. You may want to consider giving them a RAFT, which is a choice of writing assignments in different forms and from different points of view. You can learn more about the RAFT writing process HERE.

Try these ideas out and think of some other ways to engage students in a written text.  Please comment on this post of you have some ideas to share, particularly for non-fiction texts.

HERE are some Spanish Reading passages that work well with these activities.