Alternate PingPong/Volleyball Reading

Here is an alternate way to do a ping-pong/volleyball reading with your students. I learned this from Alina Filipescu many years ago at IFLT, but I had forgotten about it until now. It still implements the basic concept of a ping-pong/volleyball reading, but it goes a lot faster, thus you can get in more repetitions.

This still involves a partner read/translation, but the difference now is that there is no longer the "read the sentence in the target language" part. 

Directions

1. Give students a reading with which they are familiar.
2. Partner up students.
3. Student A translates the first sentence into English.
4. Student B translates the next sentence into English.
5. Student A translates the next sentence into English...and so on.

Observations

1. I like how much more quickly this goes than a traditional ping-pong/volleyball reading. Students seem to like this better too for that aspect.
2. The downside is that in taking away the "read the sentence in the target language" part, there is little processing time for the partner to translate the sentence into English. As a result, this needs to be a story with which students are familiar or a story which can be read easily.
3. This alternate way adds some novelty and variety in doing a ping-pong/volleyball reading.
4. Because students get through a reading much more quickly than the traditional style, they also re-read it more, thus getting in more repetitions of understandable messages.
5. This can still be done in Read Dating, Airplane Reading, or traditional ping-pong reading situation. The changing of partners after 1-2 minutes adds much movement to the reading activity.