The goal of the Readers’ Theatre intervention is to assist youth and adolescents in acquiring motivation for reading and building supplemental opportunities to enhance reading fluency and comprehension. Readers’ Theatre is an intervention designed to improve students’ reading through the use of strategies similar to repeated reading to practice reading fluently, while incorporating engaging activities to increase participants’ motivation to read. Readers’ Theatre is an intervention designed to increase students’ fluency and motivation to read aloud by incorporating strategies that combines engaging creative arts performance with reading practice. Young and Rasinski (2017) found Reader’s Theatre to have a large effects in improving words read accurately (d = 2.21) and students’ prosody (d = 1.15) when implemented with 2nd graders, 31% who were ELL. Similarly, middle school students (60% disadvantaged), were shown to improve in their reading fluency (d = .848). This intervention is not manualized, but it’s a supplemental approach that can be combined with a more targeted strategy to improve motivation or cultural fit of a reading intervention.

EBI Brief for Readers’ Theatre