The Reading Challenge

(Overcoming) The Reading Challenge

?It’s nothing new, nor is it surprising, that the Generation Alpha and Z students that fill our classrooms today are rarely motivated by the idea of reading a short text, and heaven forbid the idea of actually opening and reading a book. But with reading being such a vital skill, and not only for language learning, how can we overcome this obstacle?

Knowing your students is a plus, but you don’t actually need to know your students on an extremely personal basis in order to know one thing that they will most likely all have in common, and that will undoubtedly get them reading silently, while actually paying attention to, and taking in, the words on the page… A competition!

At Camarena Canet Multilingual School, in Valencia, we have opted for an online reading platform: Fiction Express. With a wide range of fiction to choose from, arranged into three different levels of difficulty, this platform is a highly suitable choice for teachers and students of English as a foreign language. Not only does the platform provide books of all genres, with eye-catching covers to attract the younger crowd, but it also comes with downloadable classroom activities and end-of-chapter quizzes. The latter being where my idea and suggestion for motivating our students to read originates from.

You might be thinking ‘that’s all very well, but at my school we don’t have access to online platforms’. Well, if that’s the case, don’t worry! It is not necessary to have access to a reading platform to read in class, nor to carry out the activity that I propose and believe with most certainty will get your students reading contently. The activity which I like to call “The Reading Challenge”.

Before starting the class, I begin by telling the students that we are going to have a competition. As I’m sure you can imagine, their eyes immediately light up from the excitement of being given an opportunity to do better than their peers. I then explain that we are going to have a quiz with ten questions and that their challenge is to get at least eight correct answers. Of course, you can change the number depending on the level of your students and the difficulty of the material that they are reading. However, I have generally found that the further you put the goal posts, the harder they try.

If reading a book as a collective, you can prepare the quiz yourself beforehand, and then the class is ready to go. Simply skimming through the chapter that you plan to read and writing down ten comprehension questions will prepare you for the reading class. Then, the touch of competition will ensure that the students pay full attention and get the most out of the lesson, as opposed to just gazing at a page of blurry words and wishing that the lunch hour would arrive sooner.

So, next time you are planning to do reading in class, and most probably dreading having to tell the students, for the glum expressions and negative groans that you will receive, why not think about a quiz? Are you ready for the challenge?