Reading Assignments: Real Comprehension, Real Engagement
We've all assigned a reading and gotten back a class's worth of "yeah I read it" — followed by a discussion where it becomes painfully obvious that maybe four of them actually did. With v1.5.0, Reading Assignments give your students something to actually do with a text — and give you a clear, honest picture of who understood it, who skimmed, and who needs another pass. No more guessing.
Video Overview
Reading Is the Skill We Quietly Skip
Reading is one of the most valuable things a language learner can do — and one of the easiest to half-do. It quietly builds vocabulary, sharpens grammar intuition, and opens up culture in ways nothing else really matches. But honestly checking who got it? That's the part that always breaks down. Writing comprehension questions takes time. Grading thirty short responses takes more time. So reading drifts toward "I'll just trust them," and the students who needed the most support are the ones we never quite catch up with.
Reading Assignments are built to solve that quietly. Pick or paste your text, attach the kinds of questions you want, and we'll handle the grading — including the open-ended responses that normally eat your weekend.
More Than One Passage
A single assignment can hold as many passages as you want — each with its own set of questions, presented to students one at a time. That opens up the kinds of reading tasks you've probably wanted to assign but haven't bothered building from scratch: comparing two perspectives on the same event, tracing an argument across multiple sources, moving students through a story in scaffolded chunks. Suddenly those become a fifteen-minute setup instead of a Saturday afternoon project.
Question Types for What You're Actually Trying to Test
Comprehension isn't one thing. Sometimes you want to know if students caught a specific detail. Sometimes you want to see how they think about a passage. Each passage supports three question formats so you can match the question to what you actually want to find out:
Multiple Choice
Quick and clean for testing literal comprehension, vocab in context, or the main idea. Graded instantly with no ambiguity.
Short Answer
Open-ended responses you grade against an expected answer. The AI looks at whether they captured the key idea — not whether they got the exact wording — and tells you why.
Free Response
The deeper, more reflective questions — inference, synthesis, personal response. The questions that make multiple choice feel shallow.
Highlighting That Tells You How They Read
Students can highlight and annotate the text as they read — the kind of active reading we always tell them to do but rarely get to see them actually do. Their highlights are saved with the submission, so you can look back at what struck them, what confused them, what they thought mattered. It's a small window into the reading process that most assignments completely miss.
Active reading, not just answer-hunting
When students know they can mark up the text, they engage differently with it. The students who annotate consistently tend to retain more and answer more accurately — because the act of choosing what to highlight is itself a moment of comprehension. It's a small change with real impact.
A Reading Coach Built In
Your students have Quetzalita with them while they read — but in a reading-specific mode. She'll help them work through tough vocabulary, clarify a tangled grammatical structure, or think out loud about what an inference might be pointing to. What she won't do is summarize the passage for them or hand them an answer. If they ask, she redirects them back to the text. She's the helpful classmate who'll talk through the hard parts with them, not the friend who lets them copy.
Grading That Actually Teaches
Multiple choice grades instantly. Short answer and free response are evaluated the moment a student submits, with each response getting a real explanation — not just a score. Students see exactly why they got the points they got, and what the expected response was looking for. You can adjust any score or add your own note. The students see your note alongside the AI's, so your voice is still in there.
It's a tiny lesson on every question
The feedback isn't just justification — it's instruction. A student who loses points sees what they missed, in plain language, while the reading is still fresh. That feedback loop, on every question, every assignment, builds something traditional grading rarely does: real awareness of where their comprehension is breaking down.
A Class View That Tells You What to Reteach
Once submissions come in, you can see each student's full response — their answers, their scores, the AI's explanation, every annotation. The class-level view aggregates all of it, so the questions everyone bombed jump out instantly. That's not a grading insight; that's a teaching one. The questions where the whole class struggled are usually telling you something about the passage, the vocabulary, or the concept that needs another pass. You don't have to fish for that pattern anymore — it just shows up.
Late and Lockdown Options
Late submissions are still accepted and fully graded — late kids still get the feedback they need, with a penalty you set applied to the LinguaPoints they earn. And if you want to run a reading as a real assessment, Secure Testing Mode locks it down: no leaving the tab without it being logged, no pasting in answers, no in-browser AI sidebars going unnoticed. Same Lingua, more teeth when you need them.