Practice Foreign Language Text with Fluency Tutor

We talk a lot about Fluency Tutor for Google as a powerful tool for students to practice and improve their reading, whether it’s young readers just starting to master their skills or struggling readers who need the extra practice outside of the classroom. But did you know that Fluency Tutor is not just for students practicing reading in English?

Fluency Tutor gives teachers the power and flexibility to create custom reading passages out of almost any content they want. For teachers who teach a foreign language like Spanish or French, this means you can use Fluency Tutor to have your students practice reading in that language!

Use Fluency Tutor to create a passage of some text you’d like to have your students read - anything from a vocabulary list, to a poem, to a passage from a novel or textbook. In just 5 easy steps, your students will have a reading assignment to practice and submit to you for feedback:

1. Open a Google Doc or webpage with the text you’d like students to practice

2. Click the green Fluency Tutor Share extension (make sure you’ve got it installed first!)

3. Select the correct language from the dropdown

4. Make any adjustments you’d like to the title, description and passage

5. Click to share with students via Google Drive or Google Classroom

The best part for your students is the additional support tools they can use while practicing their reading, like text to speech, dictionary, picture dictionary and translator. Text to Speech is available for lots of languages like Spanish, French, Chinese and German. In addition, the Dictionary is available in French and the picture dictionary is available in French and Spanish. When you select your language, check out the icons to the right of the dropdown to see which support features will be available for your students.

Students can then practice as much as they’d like, and click Record when ready to record and send to their teacher. You can then listen, score and give immediate feedback to get them on their way to becoming a successful, multilingual student.

Think the foreign language teachers at your school might like this? They can try Fluency Tutor by downloading the app from the Chrome Store today!