Ratliff Reader’s Theatre: Exercises to Enhance Reading Comprehension

25/S 8:00 AM White

Type_Presentation: 60-minute Concurrent Session

PresentationTitle: [Reader's Theatre]: Exercises to Enhance Reading Comprehension and Visualization

ProgramStrand_Primary: College Reading

ProgramStrand_Secondary: Freshman Year Experience

Presentation_description:

This participatory workshop for teachers and tutors leads participants through a creative series of Reader's Theatre exercises designed for students who may be unaccustomed to oral reading strategies that may prove valuable in translating a literary text from the printed page to the classroom stage. Sample exercises, lessons and scripts also provided.

Session_summary:

The basic impulse in Reader's Theatre is focused on reading comprehension that enhances a student's ability to initially "visualize" a literary text and then to discover the artistic and dramatic visualization of the actions, attitudes and emotions of literary characters in classroom performance. The critical reading of a literary text closely resembles the analysis techniques used in a literature classroom to reveal complexities of character, plot, structure and theme. It is the basic performance principle of Reader's Theatre, however, that calls attention to the writrten images or individual words of a literary text and promotes a student's deeper understanding of a literary text.

The proposed participatory workshop focuses on selected classroom activities and exercises that encourage student readers to first envision and then to enact--in both voice and body--a literary character's intention or motivation and then to translate that reading comprehension into a classroom performance of the text. The workshop activities and exercises focus on four specific types of "action" that student readers should be aware of in reading a literary text: (1) character action that indicates the individual habits or traits of a character that surface from a close reading of the text; (2) instinctive action, or spontaneous reactions and responses, that emerge in classroom rehearsal; (3) descriptive action that provides the voice, gesture and movement of a literary character; and (4) dramatic action that emerges in the close reading of a text and propels a character into the series of incidents or events described in the literary text.

Workshop participants will engage in individual and small group exercises and activities that (a) introduce the basic classroom performance principles of Reader's Theatre; (b) explore the role of Reader's Theatre in promoting reading comprehension and text visualization skills; and (c) engage in sample classroom reading and performance instructional models that promote Reader's Theatre principles in sample assignments, lesson plans and scripts It is anticipated that the workshop learning objectives of introducing the basic principles of Readewr's Theatre to enrich reading comprehension and text visualization will be realized in the selected exercises, small group work, sample lesson plans and active discussion. Participants will also receive a packet of sample Reader's Theatre classroom scripts based on specific reading assignments, reference materials, additional exercises and bibliographical materials related to instructional pedagogy.

The workshop is particularly relevant to CRLA members and other conference participants who have an interest in pursung alternative instructional approaches to promote reading comprehension using performance-based activities and exercises that promote acive student engagement.

PresenterBio: The presenter is a frequent guest speaker at national conferences -- CEA, MLA and NCA among others--author of numerous articles related to performance approaches to text analysis and interpretation and author of the popular high school and college/university textbook An Introduction to Reader's Theatre.