Reader's Theater: A Strategy to Make Social Studies Click

by Regina Rees and Mary Lou DiPillo, Beeghly College of Education at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio

In recent years, reader's theater has become a relatively common practice in many language arts classrooms. This popular strategy is used across grade levels to motivate reluctant readers and increase fluency. The Report of the National Reading Panel, released in January 2000, emphasized fluency as one of the five essential components of reading instruction, along with phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension. Yet of these five components, reading experts cautioned that fluency is often neglected in many classrooms.

Current reading researchers, recognizing the strong connection of fluency to comprehension, have brought renewed attention to this important aspect of reading instruction. And reader's theater, as well as repeated readings, the Neurological Impress Method (NIM), and other oral reading practices, is now advocated as a strategy that reading and language arts teachers can use to improve their students' overall reading abilities.

While young readers in the primary grades can reap the benefits of using reader's theater, middle-level students particularly enjoy the interactive nature of this strategy. Students in the middle grades are very social beings, and strategies that actively engage them in learning activities with their classmates are usually winners.

As teacher educators who have numerous years of experience in middle-grade classrooms, we were interested in investigating how this language arts strategy might be utilized in another content-area classroom. Our goals were to actively involve the students in reading scripts that would both motivate them and help them to more easily comprehend the content.

We piloted our reader's theater project with sixth grade social studies classes in both an urban and a suburban setting. We chose two classes in each building. Because we wanted to introduce the concept of using reader's theater in this content area, we decided to write the scripts ourselves before asking students to adapt their text information.

We began by selecting a chapter from each class's social studies textbook, paying attention to the two teachers' objectives and the Ohio standards for the chapters. We wrote a script for each section of the chapters. (If anyone is interested in seeing or discussing the scripts, just contact us by email. We are happy to share.)

The class was divided into groups, with each group taking charge of a script. The suburban students were studying the Indian and Persian Empires. We wanted to make Chandragupta and the Golden Age of India come alive for the students, and so the setting of our scripts included both a talk show where the various rulers of ancient India and Persia were interviewed and a news report with on-the-scene reporters bringing the latest news from ancient India.

The urban students were studying Mesopotamia. The chapter in their textbook was filled with many names, dates, and geographic locations. Our scripts for this chapter included one with townspeople from Mesopotamia engaged in a conversation about the building of the empire and one with an interview of famous leaders of ancient Mesopotamia.

As the students rehearsed their scripts, we noticed that everyone was engaged in the process. Students read and reread their scripts and helped each other with characterizations and vocabulary. The highlight of our project happened one day in our urban school. As we entered the classroom to work with the small groups on their scripts, our sixth graders actually clapped for us, a reaction we seldom get from our college classes. Their enthusiasm was heartwarming to us, and let us know that this strategy was endorsed by our eager students.

At the conclusion of the project, we met with a group of sixth graders to interview them about their experiences with incorporating reader's theater in their social studies classroom. One student stated, "I really like acting, and so I liked learning about the different lessons in a different way other than reading from a textbook." Another student responded, "I liked performing in front of the class and using different voices for different people." Many other students indicated they enjoyed reading the plays instead of just reading from the textbook, and especially appreciated the opportunity to be with their friends as they practiced the scripts.

When asked if the reader's theater scripts made studying the social studies content more enjoyable, one student stated, "Yes, very much, because it showed you how you could learn fast, but in a fun way." Another student shared, "You could think of it in a different way, from a perspective as if you were there."

All the students seemed to feel that practicing the scripts helped them remember the social studies information since they were reading the scripts repeatedly to prepare for their performances. One student shared, "Reading from a textbook doesn't necessarily mean as much to you as when you get to get up and move around and start trying to think about it because maybe you want to do good in a play."

The students also felt that the scripts helped to develop a better understanding of the text. One student explained, "I didn't know all of the people, but then when I kinda met them in person, sort of, it helped me." Another student admitted that she always got the names of the important historical people mixed up, but that the plays helped her because she could remember who read the various parts, "and it clicked."

Although many of the students expressed a personal enjoyment with reading books, newspapers, and magazines, they all resoundingly declared their lack of interest in reading textbooks. The reader's theater scripts, then, seemed to motivate the students to continue learning during the last weeks of the school year by providing the social studies content in a unique way. One student summed it up by stating, "The plays made you want to go to social studies. You looked forward to the class."

The students believed that using the scripts during social studies could be improved by providing more time in class for practice, as well as permitting more than one group to perform each script. They also suggested using the scripts earlier in the year so they would have a longer time period to utilize this strategy. Finally, the students believed that reader's theater could be used in other content areas, particularly language arts and science. Although using the strategy during language arts is rather self-explanatory, they thought pretending to be different rock types or cells could make science content more understandable. Even certain topics in mathematics could benefit from the scripts.

While the students clearly enjoyed performing the scripts we wrote for them, we were curious about the possibility of engaging them as authors for future scripts. A few of the students were hesitant about their ability to write the plays, but most of the students expressed enthusiasm, stating "that would be fun to do for like a project." They thought the teacher could then select the best scripts for performance, and the author could become the director for the script. Some students also felt that if they wrote the scripts, they might be even more appealing since they could make the scripts "cool" by including current trends and TV game show formats, like a Deal or No Deal script.

We loved working with reader's theater in our middle-grade social studies classrooms. Our teachers loved using the scripts we wrote with their students and found that the students performed better on their tests after practicing their scripts. Perhaps most importantly, the students loved working with this strategy in a new way, outside of the regular language arts period. The benefits for the readers who performed the scripts after repeatedly reading them, as well as for the audience members who listened to the performances and received the information in an interesting way, were apparent in the students' performance on tests. We are planning to continue this project in the fall with new groups of middle-level students, encouraged by a quote from one of our participants: "Reader's theater is AWESOME!"

Authors' note: We are still doing research, with a focus on other content areas as well as social studies. We are excited about the results so far! Stay tuned for a new report.

Editor's note: The term reader's theater doesn't seem to be standardized. It also appears in the literature as readers' theater and readers theater, as well as in capitalized versions of these forms, as, for example, Reader's Theater. And if this weren't enough, theater is often spelled theatre―British style. At In Perspective, our house style is (as you can see) reader's theater.

Regina Rees is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education in the Beeghly College of Education at Youngstown State University, where she teaches reading, language arts, and middle school courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Akron. She can be contacted at rmrees@ysu.edu.

Mary Lou DiPillo serves as associate dean of Beeghly College of Education at Youngstown State University and teaches reading courses to undergraduate education majors and SIRI workshops for area teachers. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Akron.She can be contacted at mldipillo@ysu.edu.

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