Below is a link to a sequence of Spanish reading activities which start easy and get progressively harder. Each activity has to be passed with a fairly high score. All of the activities are based on the SAME text, so the content is repeated over and over.
http://www.textivate.com/sequence-w4njn1
The overall score and total time spent are recorded by textivate if you are logged in as a student and you submit the sequence results at the end of the sequence, but you can just close the log-in box to try out the sequence.
The point is that you could ask students to compete to complete the sequence in the quickest time - but ojo: if they don't complete an activity with a high enough score, they have to do it again, and this adds to their overall time.
Note that these particular activities have a parallel English text to help with the sequencing (and to reinforce the meaning of the text) - available by clicking the little text icon at the top-right of the screen.
If you think that this isn't a particularly stimulating story, I'd agree, but hopefully you get the idea about how you can do this sort of thing with your own stories - even with embedded readings.
You can easily set these sorts of activities for class work if you have access to tech in class, or for homework (which you can easily make optional if you don't want to force students to do this or if you're concerned about access to tech at home).
(BTW - this resource was put together using the "multiple-resource sequence" procedure outlined here: http://textivate.posthaven.com/multiple-resources-sequences - this allows you to put together a sequence based on several textivate resources, although all of the activities in the above sequence are taken from the same resource.)