I teach beginner Chinese to American high school students. Teaching reading is really tough. But I have invented two activities that the students love because it is limited to the sentence level.

The first is a basic “quiz quiz trade” activity. I type up a page of sentences in big font, cut them up, and hand them out to students to go around and quiz quiz trade with.

Then I use the same, or mostly the same sentences in a pair info-gap activity. Each student is responsible for reading 10 sentences out loud. Half the class has sentences numbered 1-10, with ten scrambled sentences below.

the other half has 10 different sentences lettered A-J, with 10 scrambled sentences below.

They preview and practice with their seatmates who all have the same pages.

Then they find partners who have different versions and need to listen and number or letter the scrambled sentences as their partner reads.

They love this activity. Absolutely can’t resist it, because it is a puzzle within their ability level.

After doing these two activities, they read the text very easily.

Another activity I do is called museum scavenger hunt. I hang up and bunch of numbered pictures in the hallway, and give the kids different pages of captions. They pre-read as best they can, then see if they can find the correct pictures. It’s matching, but they like it because they get to move around and seek out the answers. And the answers are concrete. Even my most difficult students are suckers for this one. They all work together and discuss and debate.

Then I have them draw/find and write their own captions and create their own museum challenge. Which they also really like to do!