Would you love to do more reading activities with your Spanish students but find that they get easily intimidated with a chunk of text in Spanish? Do you have students that shut down and complain “I can’t read in Spanish!”? How can we help our students overcome the hurdle of feeling confident to read in Spanish? Read on to find out the key to my success in getting my students reading.
Frontloading is the secret! The more context you can give them before they ever see the text will help them to feel that they can dive into reading. My best trick is to use pictures to give them a mental representation of what they’re about to read. That way, they already have an idea of what they’re about to read and don’t get so stuck on every little word.
Check out some examples:
I taught a Service Learning course (My favorite class of all time!) and we discussed real issues impacting the Spanish speaking community at home and abroad. One topic we tackled was access to nutritious food and food deserts. This can be a fairly intense and complex topic, but I wanted my students to read about it. So first, we looked at pictures to figure out what the article was focused on. My students filled out a “See, Think, Wonder” worksheet to really get their brains engaged and curious. We then discussed our impressions and then finally read the article together.
This helped to give them the vocabulary and a mental image of what we were about to read ahead of time. This decreases stress when students see a block of text and helps them more more easily absorb the Spanish that they’re reading.
Ready to boost your students’ confidence in reading in Spanish? Try frontloading with pictures and class discussion. Get them to make predictions so that way they’re less intimidated when presented with the text.
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