Text highlighting is a great way to assess what students understand in a reading without translating or responding to questions. Decide on colors and review the colors and parts of speech with examples. You way want to have students only focus on one particular part of speech (subjects = who?) or various responses. This is also a helpful activity for students to practice recognizing parts of speech in a sentence. You could also set it up so that students highlight various verb tenses to demonstrate their ability to recognize the tenses and contextualize them when reading. It is likely that not all students will have all of the colors of highlighters. In this case I have them complete the activity by rotating to stations around the room.
Do you have enough an example of this? Is it just for question words or parts of speech like nouns, pronouns, verbs?
It is more about content and details, though it could be modified to focus on grammar points.