Pages: 112 Price: $17.99 U.S./$23.99 CAN ISBN: 0-439-52223-4
Jo Worthy has extended her engaging work with Readers Theater from a series of journal articles into a book length teaching resource with multiple creative possibilities offered to teachers and students. The Worthy and Prater (2002) article has been a perennial favourite for my pre-service language and literacy classes and so the opportunity to review the Worthy book publication was an invocation for more inspirited engagement with her work. In my third year of teaching primary/junior pre-service teachers in language arts and literacy, the lived experience of Readers Theater is always the most exciting and popular session of our curriculum discourse.
Worthy provides her readers with a fine introduction to the generative possibilities of Readers Theater. She offers step-by-step instructions and a convincing theoretical back-up for why it works. The text is presented in a highly accessible format to pre-service teachers who often resist difficult "reads" particularly those involving theory. I am delighted that Worthy has provided a text that is easily accessible to pre-service and beginning teachers as well as to experienced teachers. The introduction gives a sampling of success stories of transformative experiences easily confirmed and reinforced by anyone who has worked with Readers Theater. The chapters that follow provide details for the why and how it works. Throughout the book, there are photos of Readers Theater in action to support the excitement generated through the classroom narratives.
Chapter One demonstrates the multidimensional approach to using Readers Theater. One of the most engaging arguments for Readers Theater is that it encourages grouping by interest rather than ability level. Readers Theater can be woven into the language arts program, connected with literature and can be used across the curriculum in subject areas such as science and math. Worthy demonstrates how Readers Theater can be beneficial for students learning English and also for maintaining heritage languages. For resistant and struggling readers, Readers Theater has been shown to be highly motivating. Worthy contends that "Readers Theater reaches resistant readers in a way that few other approaches can" (p.75). In Chapter Two, we are provided with a review of the research on reading fluency and a discussion of the relationship between fluency, repeated readings and Readers Theater. That repeated readings build fluency is backed by research. Activities involving Readers Theater engage students in pleasurable re-reading experiences. Repeated readings become purposeful as students prepare for an audience. Readers Theater also draws on comprehension and interpretation in relationship to expression and intonation. Following the establishment of the benefits backed by theory and research, Worthy continues in Chapter Three to set the stage by addressing the introduction period for Readers Theater with a very prescriptive design for supplies and scripts, costumes and props, procedures, practice and performance. Lesson plans are included. I find this chapter somewhat overly prescriptive; however, I must confess to receiving countless e-mails from students on practicum placements with the questions for further detailed guidance of the kind that Worthy provides. Perhaps prescriptions are needed to support those edgy beginning experiences.
Multiple sources for locating scripts are offered in Chapter Four, including many scripts that can be freely downloaded from websites. This chapter is an amazing site for locating a variety of scripts: poetry and other lyrical texts including Paul Fleischman’s poems for multiple voices, fairy tales and other children's books with transformations and variants that contribute to a wide variety of possibilities. Worthy provides samples of adapting short stories and novels to scripts. Teachers and students can work together creating scripts from novels and chapter books. The chapter ends with a script writing lesson which is just a beginning for generating endless possibilities of the yet-to-come. Chapter Five offers suggestions that work toward preparing for an audience: invitations, programs and responsibilities. Readers Theater begs an audience. Worthy provides suggestions for reviewing both performer and audience skills and the interactions in-between. Especially enticing is the opportunity for the audience to join in. The audience can include parents as well as school-mates.
Another draw for the book is the highly relevant list of supplementary professional references. The richness and the rigor of Readers Theater come to life through the intertexts of Worthy with Fleischman—of Worthy with Silverman—of Worthy in dialogue with so many other voices. I would like to contribute another reference to the resource list with Carolyn Graham’s (1988) Jazz Chant Fairy Tales. I always open the space of Readers Theater with these jazz chants and then move on to intertextual spaces with other authors. Worthy provides multiple lists of richly textured resources from which to draw materials. An appendix offers a selection of Worthy’s “greatest hits” as she refers to them—a virtual potpourri of possibilities that must be experienced to appreciate the amazing versatility. The "hits" include two scripts based on Christopher Maynard’s (1999) Micro Monsters: Life Under the Microscope bringing science into theater and theatricality into science. The story of Bobbi Salinas’s (1998) Los Tres Cerdos/The Three Little Pigs: Nacho, Tito, and Miguel delights readers with bilingual features and encourages the languages of the classroom to enter into conversations. Jo Worthy alerts the reader to Aaron Shepard’s amazing website for script resources. A further addition to the reference list could be Ada and Campoy (2004) who provide rich prompts for scripting that could easily be transformed into Readers Theater working toward intertextual choreographies of the live(d) stories of students across cultures and languages. Enter into Worthy’s work with Graham, Fleischman, Ada and Campoy together with Aaron Shepard and a touch of Seuss and … oh! the places you’ll go! …
If there is anything lacking for me in this text it would be the rich theoretical interpretive possibilities with notions of intertextuality and performativity. The Worthy text is easily accessible and highly prescriptive, which is what many pre-service teachers want, but I believe we need to stretch the discursive possibilities of language. As one works with Readers Theater there is an invocation for a transformation of language. Readers Theater evokes rich language play—encourages multiplicities of interpretive possibilities—opens spaces for multilingual co-habitations. Having experienced these generative interpretive possibilities with both primary and junior level students in school settings, pre-service teacher candidates in teacher education and adult learners of English as a Second Language, I am encouraged by the endless possibilities. Since my own theoretical leanings draw from post-structuralism, I find myself re-reading—re-writing. The book provides for each stage and for each staging. As one engages with Readers Theater, the work shifts and dislocates from prescriptions to re-scriptings.
This book is for reading but the scripts must be experienced—enacted—embodied—re-scripted—in multiple lines of flight—to be appreciated. Kudos to Jo Worthy for this exemplary introduction to the amazing possibilities evoked through Readers Theater. Try out [for] her greatest hits—work the intertext with multiple combinations of her rich references. And for those teachers and students with empirical inclinations, rest assured that your students will be overheard in the corridors articulating: "And research says …." Readers Theater is backed by theorists as well as by the lived experiences of teachers doing action research. The linear sequences of chapters can easily be dismantled with gigs-on-the-go—a beginning script and a troupe of readers will be eager to perform for classmates in neighbouring classrooms on a moment's notice.
As my students have repeatedly informed me: Readers Theater has a life of its own.
References
Ada, A.F. & Campoy, F.I. (2004). Authors in the classroom: A transformative education process. Boston: Pearson
Fleischman, P. (2000). Big talk: Poems for four voices. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.
Graham, C. (1988). Jazz Chant Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Worthy, J. & Prater, K. (2002). “I thought about it all night”: Readers Theater for reading fluency and motivation. The Reading Teacher, 56(3), 294-297.
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