Special Selection
Year after year, our classrooms are filled with more students who seem to struggle with reading and are less motivated to pick up a book and read. For years, professionals have sought ways to enhance and enrich literacy programs that would help struggling readers perform better . Most of our students come to us with the notion that good reading means reading all the words correctly and quickly. Moran (2006) stated that fluency requires a combination of sight-word recognition, comprehension, and verbal expression. Teachers have introduced a variety of reading into their daily reading lessons of raising literacy levels. One of these activities is Readers’ Theatre.
Worthy and Prater (2002) describe Readers’ Theatre in where “students rehearse a poem, joke, story, script, speech, or appropriate text until they can read it with fluency and expression and then perform it for an audience” (p. 294). The main purpose of Readers’ Theatre is to have readers repeatedly practice from a script and then perform to an audience while using the script with minimal props and movement. The main goal for these students is to convey meaning through their phrasing, intonation, and pitch (Garrett & O’Connor, 2010). Garrett and O’Connor (2010) believe that if students can express meaning, they can understand the text. Effective educators reinforce that good reading is when you ready fluently and understand the text (Moran, 2006).
Readers’ Theatre and Content Instruction
Early elementary classrooms focus heavily on reading and mathematics, leaving out time for other areas such as science (Kinniburgh & Shaw, 2007). Because of this, students are not able to read the technical language and academic vocabulary used in science in the upper elementary grades (Kinniburgh & Shaw). Kinnigurgh and Shaw (2007) stated that Readers’ Theatre has the capacity to integrate with all other classroom content. They have found that Readers’ Theatre can help students discover the meanings of science vocabulary as well as put concepts into language that students can understand and express. When a science term or concept is written in a language that a student can understand, and when that student is trying to convey the term or concept to an audience after repeatedly practicing and reading all week, fluency and comprehension will occur (Kinniburgh & Shaw, 2007).
Readers’ Theatre and Content Instruction
Motivation
Readers’ Theatre motivates the students to invest their own personalities to their reading parts through expression, pitch, and pauses (Kinniburgh & Shaw, 2007). Worthy and Prater (2002) found Readers’ Theatre to be one activity that combines several effective research-basedpractices that also increases engagement with literacy in the most resistant readers. Furthermore, Worthy and Prater reported that “as students learn what is needed to prepare for a successful performance, they are motivated to work and practice together productively” (p. 295). Readers’ Theatre allows for students to be grouped by interests rather than by reading levels (Worthy & Prater). Vasinda and McLeod (2011) found that students want to read their best when it comes to performance time, parents and families found it easy to help out their student with their script, which not only creates a learning environment at home, but it keeps the motivation of the student going from classroom .
to home and back to the classroom. Students no longer have to labor through difficult terms and vocabulary; they are having fun taking a concept
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