Reading in a Foreign Language

Hi all, Claudia here,

A close friend and colleague of mine told me about this great activity to start a reading or literature course in a foreign language. I recently tried it out in my classroom and it worked very nicely.

First you need to choose a short text, written in the students' native language, that will be well known among the students but that has a few uncommon words that not many of the students will know. You give each student a copy of the text and, in the target language, ask them to read it and underline any word they don't know. After they are all done, you ask them what words they didn't know, and you tell them the ones you don't know. Ask if anyone can explain the meaning of any of the words mentioned. You then close the activity by asking the class if they were able to understand the text at all.

The point of this activity is to show students that, even in their native language, there are words in texts that they might not understand, but that despite those words they can still understand the texts. So in a foreign language it also is possible to understand readings with out the use of a dictionary for every single word you might not grasp right away.

You can see below a copy of the text we used in our class. Please let me know if this works for you or if you know of any other good ideas!