Master Thesis

Background/Context: Numerous students often struggle with their reading skills, such as reading fluency and comprehension. A concept that has been gaining popularity is reader’s theatre, where students work in groups to practice an assigned script and perform as if they were in a play. 

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Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The study examined the impacts of reader’s theatre on struggling readers by asking the question: How might reader's theatre with English Language Learner students in third grade English Language Arts impact their ability to read fluently as measured by student work samples, anecdotal notes, and video and audio recordings, obtained five to seven times?

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Research Design: Two 3rd grade English Language Learners who moved from Korea within the past year participated in five separate 1-hour sessions. Each session had a different reader’s theatre script the two students would work on for the performance at the end. Student work samples, anecdotal notes, and video and audio recordings were used for data collection to be analyzed for any growth.  

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Findings/Results: Through practice and rereads of the scripts, the students improved their reading fluency by increasing their word recognition accuracy, reading rate, and prosody. In addition, the students’ comprehension of the reading changed and became more sophisticated. Students are more engaged and motivated to read when they are able to make the story their own.

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Conclusions/Recommendations: From this study, reader’s theatre resulted in many benefits for these two students. Looking towards future implementations, it is possible to incorporate reader’s theatre whole-class. Norms and a regular structure should be taken into consideration for larger groups. Pre- and post-assessments of reading passages can be done throughout for each student to check for progress.