Reader’s Theater

Your beginner students overcame the difficulties of reading phonemes and words and started reading stories, but they didn’t get interested? They stammer and stumble, sigh and pause all the time? Reader’s theater is a real cure for such problems.

Students are involved in reading aloud naturally. They don’t need to repeat the story many times, because the teacher said so to improve their reading. Now, it’s a rehearsal. The final performance will be in front of all classmates, who become the audience. Usually costumes and decorations are not necessary. Students show emotions by voice and facial expression. The increasing fluency in reading goes hand in hand with text comprehension. Children have to understand what they read to express everything correctly. The approval by classmates increases reading confidence and learning motivation.

Reader’s theater is easy to organise. The teacher just finds an interesting script, prints it and hands out, assigns a part to each child, and has them simply read the script aloud and act it out. The teacher’s role is to keep a record of miscues, to plan the steps of further practice and assess the learners’ progress.

Script

Any good story can make a script.  In general, look for stories that are simple and lively, with lots of dialogues or action, and with not too many scenes or characters. It’s better to start with an easy and short script. This will allow the students to listen to the story many times and not to think a lot over the words. You can underline or italicize words that should be stressed or insert stage directions to indicate the feeling behind speeches. Each student should have his own copy of the script and his words should be highlighted in a bright colour.

This site provides us with great scripts for Reader’s theater.

Staging

The students can act out the script in different ways. As we said before, they use voice and miming, although, a pantomime, additional objects and relevant movements make Reader’s theater more impressive and involving for kids. Thus, take into account individual qualities of your students and their desire to be actors.

A stage is unnecessary. Students simply stand or sit in a semicircle. They don’t need to memorize their parts, but can always read the script. Start slowly and spend the time necessary so students feel comfortable in the performance mode. Help your students if they don’t know any words or don’t understand a character. 

Reading

Young learners often need some instructions before reading. Aaron Shepard in his book “Readers on stage” gives some useful tips:

1. Underline the words that tell about anything you’ll need to act out—words in either the stage directions or other readers’ speeches. If you’re given extra stage directions later, write them in the margin in pencil.
2. Read through your part silently. If there are places you’ll need to pause between sentences, mark them with a couple of slashes (//).
3. Read through your part out loud. If you’re a character, think about how that character would sound. Should you try a funny voice? How would the character feel about what’s happening in the story? Can you speak as if you were feeling that?
4. Stand up and read through the script again. If you’re a character, try out faces and movements. Would your character stand or move in a special way? Can you do that? If possible, try all this in front of a mirror.

Video-example of Reader’s theater

Reader’s theater is a great tool for improving your students’ reading skills. As the students indulge in the imaginary world of books, they not just read, but live the story.

We hope this article will be helpful for you and your students!