Readers’ Theatre

How does reader’s theatre affect fluency of students during reading?

How does reader’s theatre affect comprehension of students during reading?

Jamillah Simpson

RE 5040: Teacher as Researcher

Dr. David Koppenhaver

Background/ Introduction

Every year about 2 weeks prior to the 9 weeks being over, my grade level and I begin to scrounge around trying to get all of our assessments done. The math assessment can take up to 5 days to do and the reading can take about 2 weeks. Reading with each child on their grade level individually and then checking for comprehension takes a lot of time. Last school year while I was administering the running records reading assessment, I noticed my students were able to read with accuracy but were not retaining what they were reading. Thus not able to retell or answer any kind of comprehension questions. This is defiantly a problem because this showed me that these students are not really reading. They are only calling out words. This is a very bad habit that I was determined to break.

I had to think of a new and fun way to get my students to enjoy reading and really want to remember what they are reading. I began to talk with my classmates about this dilemma that I was undergoing. One of them mentioned Reader’s Theatre. I had never done Reader’s Theatre before and was unfamiliar with this reading teaching tool. So I began to do some research on this and see how Reader’s theatre helps fluency and comprehension. So for this research I decided that I wanted to answer these questions.

•  How does reader’s theatre affect fluency of students during reading?

•  How does reader’s theatre affect comprehension of students during reading?

The first thing I did was to go online and search the internet. I went to Google and typed “Readers Theatre.” Up came a bunch of scripts and how others have used Readers Theatre in their classrooms. All were very interesting and all very helpful. But I wasn’t convinced that this would help with fluency and comprehension.

So I began researching articles on reader’s theatre to see what I could find. In my research I was able to find 3 articles on how reader’s theatre helps with fluency and a quote about how RT promotes comprehension. Nurturing Emergent Readers through Reader’s Theatre by Kelli Jo Kerry Moran was one article I used. In this article it defines describes what reader’s theatre is all about. IAnd it also gives suggestions for implementation of reader’s theatre program into the classroom. Suggestions that I found from the article are:; using developmentally appropriate text, involving families, make practice a priority, perform for an audience. It also talks about how the same text can be used with diverse skill levels. Students can read different parts within the script, and how roles can be assigned based on both reading skill level and interest. I found that really interesting. Because my class is so diverse and they range in reading levels so much. That it would be so helpful to have one script and be able to use it for different leveled readers. This article was very helpful to see how to implement Reader’s Theatre in my classroom but not how it will help fluency and comprehension. So I was still looking.

The second article I found is called “Don’t think for a Minute That I’m getting up there.” Opportunities for Reader’s Theatre in a tutorial for children with reading problems by Steven D. Rinehart. This article talks about how Reader’s Theatre helps with students that have reading problems. Rinehart uses this strategy as a tutorial during read aloud. The article used 3 kinds of read aloud: planned read aloud by the tutor; read aloud spontaneously volunteered by students; and planned student/tutor reader’s theatre presentations. The results from this article showed that reader’s theatre ended up being the most successful. Achieving fluent oral reading was what I got from this article. And it helped me to see that Reader’s Theatre does help with fluency.

The third article that I found is titled, Using reader’s theatre to foster fluency in struggling readers: A twist on the repeated reading strategy by Brenda-Jean and David Chard. In this article I enjoyed reading about how reader’s theatre actually was studied and found that it does promote motivation and fluency. The article starts off by explain what fluency is and how it works. Chard’s speak about how fluency is just good comprehension. When others say that by increasing fluency comprehension will become deeper. Another article I found that talks about comprehension and Reader’s Theatre is this one. “Plays inherently come with built-in strategies to help students read better. The acting out of story dialogue compels readers to work more closely with the text to interpret and project meaning into the experience. As a result, students show improvement in vocabulary, comprehension and retention. Being a Star Makes Reading Fun! RESEARCH READER’S THEATER http://playbooks.com/readerstheaterresearch.shtml

Setting and Participants

I teach first grade at David H. Petree Elementary. Petree is an urban setting school in Winston Salem Forsyth County. It is a Ttitle 1, single culture and 98% free and reduced lunch school. I have 17 students where 13 are African American and 4 or Hispanic. This is my 5th year teaching with this year being my 3rd year teaching first grade. I taught kindergarten for my first two years and I think I like first grade better.—why? I feel like I am finally getting the hang of first grade.—in what ways?

I decided to use 5 of my first grade students in my research. Target participants are low leveled readers that are having trouble with fluency and comprehension. Two boys and three girls with two of them being Hispanic and three are African American. Yamin is a Hispanic male who receives speech services. He has been tested out of ESL, so he no longer receives those services. Kate is a Hispanic female who does get pulled out for ESL services. Diamond is an African American female who has a lot of behavior problems. I wanted to include Diamond in my research because I am still trying to find different ways to stop a lot of her misbehavior. I believed that being part of this research would help her to have something to look forward to being a part of. And maybe she would not act out so much. David is an African American male and Asia is an African American female.

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See Appendix 1.3 to see a graph showing where my students started off with fluency and comprehension. For fluency I used a paragraph on the individual students reading level. And checked how many words per minute he/she could read. For comprehension, students used a comprehension house (See Appendix 1.1) to record their comprehension of the story. Would have been easier to read this paper if you had just inserted these things in the text rather than using appendices that require flipping back and forth.

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Interventions/instruction procedure:

I did the same thing every week with a different story. Starting on Monday and ending on Friday. It was better for me to do the same thing because students knew what to expect by the 3rd week. They really looked forward to Tuesday’s and Friday’s. They knew that on Tuesday’s they would be assigned their parts and on Friday’s they would be performing. This research lasted 5 weeks.

Day One

•  I read the story to my participants

-Focusing on intonation and expression of the story. Modeling how to read with those skills and how much fun it is to read.

•  Allow students to read round robin

-Reading round robin has been proven to not benefit students reading but I felt it was the best way for me to get all students involved. During this time I was not checking for reading fluency or for comprehension. I was only looking for students to be concerned with the reading and get a feel of the story. Round robin reading is only useful for assessment—there are dozens of better strategies: reading silently, shared reading, paired reading, choral reading…

Day Two

•  Assign parts

-Students loved this day. They look forward to finding out which part they were assigned. I tried to find books that had the same amount of speaking roles for everybody.

-I ended up rotating each week with one person reading the most parts. So they were okay with knowing that they will get to read the most next week or that they read the most last week.

•  Allow students to read their parts aloud helping them only once with words.

-I would say only once. But often times I would help students more than once.

-I always encourage students to use those reading strategies (chunking, check the picture, sound out, skip and come back, getting your mouth ready) first before asking for help.

-I allowed students to read to a partner concentrating on intonation and expression. And I would also allow students to read to me.

Day Three and Four

•  Students would practice, practice, and practice.

-I would let students practice reading their parts in order of the story.

-They would also practice sitting in a chair, standing, and saying their parts in order.

-On Thursday’s they would also practice standing up and saying for example, “My name is Yamin, and I’m playing the part of the Big Bad Wolf.” They did this before every performance.

•  Reread, Reread and reread

-We would continue to practice and practice. The last week it seemed like we practiced so much, I thought they would get tired of practicing. But they didn’t. They wanted to do it more and more. Do you have any idea why?

Day Five

•  Performance

-The first week we performed for our class only. Then by the second week we performed 3 times for the other first grade classes. By that 5th week we performed for 3 first grade classes, 3 kindergarten classes, and the Principal. She loved it and the students loved it. They appreciated reading and enjoyed performing. They just kept getting better and better.

•  During Shared Reading (TDR—what does this mean?) we would go over comprehension skills to give them a better understanding of the comprehension…

-character

-Setting

-Authors purpose

-Plot

-Every day during shared reading we would consistently go over our comprehension skills.

-We would go over the skills and students could tell me what each skill was for example “character-people in the story, setting-where the story takes place, author’s purpose- entertain, persuade, describe, and inform.”

Datae Collection

*These are two ways that I assessed comprehension.

-On Friday, students would complete this comprehension house.

-They were told to make sure to draw a picture and write about the skill.

-This house has been laminated and is a very efficient way to see what students comprehend and how they retain the story. The house consisted of four doors that are open or you can call them windows. But each door has a comprehension skill on it (character, setting, plot, and author’s purpose).—these aren’t skills, they are aspects of text.

-Students had to draw a picture and write in order to receive full credit. And it allowed me to see if students really comprehended and remembered these aspects of the story.—yes, aspects of story, but NOT comprehension skills

Author’s purpose was a little hard for me at first to figure out how students would be able to draw a picture. So what I did was come up with 4 universal pictures that tell which author purpose it is. Just by looking at these pictures students knew what authors purpose I was talking about. So I had little ones available for students to cut out and paste in the house. See Appendix 1.2

*After completing the comprehension house I would use this rubric to check for understanding. Some students did not receive 4’s because they would refuse to draw a picture and write sometimes. See Appendix 1.4

*Here is how I assessed fluency during Reader’s Theatre

-I did an assessment on a passage on the students reading level. I had the student read and I recorded how many words the student read in a minute.

-One baseline was done at the beginning of the research and one baseline—baseline is only the first measure BEFORE intervention. Post-test was done at the end of the research.

-I compared the two data numbers to see how much the students improved. Here is a sample of the beginning baseline fluency.

Data Analysis

My research question consisted of two aspects of reading; fluency and comprehension. Both go together so well because without one there is no other. It was fairly easy to test both and used two different assessments to check for both.

For fluency I used a baseline before and a baseline after the research 5 week period. This was done to see how well the participant’s fluency increased. At the beginning of the research I pulled each participant up individually and had them read to me a passage on their reading level. I checked off how many words per minute students read and recorded it on a chart. Then at the end of the 5 weeks I gave the participants another passage on the same reading level and did the same WPM. I compared the two WPM to see if there was an increase or a decrease in word fluency. I also used anecdotal notes throughout the weeks to jot down any notes about reading fluency for each of my participants. This is data collection you’re describing in this paragraph. Analysis is the comparison of WPM pre and post