Reading Skills For the Seal of Biliteracy

Are your Spanish students preparing to take a test to earn the Seal of Biliteracy? If so, here is a short post about what reading skills are needed for the Seal of Biliteracy when taking the AAPPL Test. (If you’re not sure what the Seal of Biliteracy is, click HERE.)

AAPPL Test Reading Skills for the Seal of Biliteracy

The AAPPL Test is one method of testing to see if students can earn the Seal of Biliteracy. This test has several sections, but today we will only talk about the reading section.

Students will see 2 kinds of assessments. The first one tests their reading skills by showing them pictures and text captions for the pictures. Students drag and drop the correct caption to the picture it goes with. I find this test interesting because there is not a lot of text to read! But, having a diverse vocabulary, paying attention to detail and being able to use process of elimination are all important factors to being successful at this test.

On the other section of the Reading Skills Test, students will see headlines and must match them to the correct blurb from a pretend newspaper article. These tend to include more sophisticated language and deal with a wider variety of real-world issues.

Practicing Reading Skills for the Seal of Biliteracy

No teacher enjoys teaching to a test. But if we are realistic, we practice for all important tests. For example, many people take a driver’s ed course before taking their driver’s license test. We do the PSAT before students take the SAT. I think it’s also important to practice for whatever test your students will use for the Seal of Biliteracy. Here are some things you can do to help your students succeed.

Encourage them (in every year of Spanish) to learn as much vocabulary as they can! It’s the MAIN ingredient to effective communication!
Create practices that mimic the kind of test your students will take for the Seal of Biliteracy. (or save time and use mine HERE!)
Create Infographic reading activities for practice. These also don’t have a lot of text and have visual clues to help them understand!
Teach them some basic reading skills, like looking for cognates, using the context to guess meaning and using process of elimination. It always surprises me, but high school students still need direct instruction in these skills!