THE EFFECTIVENESS OF READERS' THEATRE ON FLUENCY, COMPREHENSION, AND MOTIVATION ON PRIMARY STUDENTS

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Seventy-five percent of third grade students who are at-risk will continue to struggle with reading through the years into adulthood, never to recover their potential reading development. Once less-skilled third grade readers reach ninth grade, one in six students are four times more likely to leave high school before receiving a diploma than those who are proficient readers. Whether students who read effortlessly or struggle to decode text, both cannot comprehend. This relationship between reading fluency and comprehension has educators seeking instructional resources to improve the reading deficit across the country. Readers’ theatre, as a form of repeated reading, may be one solution to the problem. Readers’ theatre is an instructional technique that engages students in heterogeneous groups providing motivation, socialization, and cooperation. An exhaustive search in this review found few quantitative studies in readers’ theatre emphasizing fluency, comprehension, motivation, and knowledge acquisition. Out of the studies found, results have been mixed on the influence of readers’ theatre on various reading components. The purpose of the study was to replicate and extend the existing studies and to further examine the effects of readers’ theatre on fluency and comprehension using expository text and instruction. This study took place in an elementary school in the mid-south, with second grade students with diverse reading abilities. Random assignment was implemented for individual students within two classrooms to a readers’ theatre condition or a repeated reading condition. The intervention lasted two weeks. Instruction consisted of expository text focused on social studies content. Students’ progress was assessed with a standardized measure of reading comprehension, oral reading fluency measures, knowledge acquisition tests, and a motivation measure. Although there were no statistically significant findings in this study, effect sizes indicated that repeated reading may be more beneficial for reading comprehension and fluency with samples such as the one used in this study and that readers’ theatre may be more beneficial for knowledge acquisition. The motivation results were mixed with the survey indicating a decline in interest among both groups and interviews indicating that readers’ theatre was interesting and motivating to the students. Practical implications and future research are also addressed in this study.