Robert Harrell on Reader’s Theatre:
Reader’s Theater is new to the concept of CI/TPRS. It needs to be distinguished from traditional Reader’s Theater.
Traditional Reader’s Theater is when an actor or group of actors performs a “reading” of a play. Often they will sit on stools and will have the script in hand. There is no scenery, and props are minimal. It allows the audience to imagine a lot of things.
Reader’s Theater as it is being used in the current conversation is, as far as I know, a creation of Jason Fritze. He has taken the idea of acting out a story and moved it up to a high-powered tool for presenting comprehensible input. Instead of using an oral story that the class has created or is creating in the moment, you use a text from a novel or other extended reading.
Choose a scene that can be easily acted out. Read the scene and have volunteer actors perform it as you read it. Involve the class in various ways. As students get more comfortable with what is going on and acquire more language, stop the action and interview the actors – what do you really think? do you like or dislike this? what will you do next? what do you want to do next? – and ask the class about what they are hearing and seeing. Keep asking the class questions that take them back into the text rathe than just relying on the action/performance they can see.
I have done elements of this for some time -as have many of us, I think – but I am nowhere near the level of Jason Fritze. As much as I have issues with the holes in the plot and logic of “The Trip of His Life”, my classes have a great time with the climax of the story. In the German version, the hero and the villain are on top of the Loreley cliff overlooking the Rhine. The “insect lady” is holding a knife to Karl’s throat and about to shove him over the edge to his death on the rocks below. We play the scene, I ask the class and actors questions, then they write their own endings before we read the last chapter and find out what really happens. (Almost every student kills off the hero; sometimes the villain gets away, sometimes she gets caught – but the hero dies.)