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4.2 Learning Motivation
RQ2: How did Readers Theater influence student’s learning attitudes in terms of authenticity, self-efficacy, autonomy and relatedness?
In terms of learning motivation, Kevin’s attitudes toward English learning became more positive. He was motivated to learn English and practice lines. Through practice and rehearsals, he became more confident reading the scripts and increased his self-efficacy. Moreover, he enjoyed the autonomous and cooperative learning atmosphere of RT.
4.2.1 Authenticity
Although he thought English was important, he was not interested in learning English and felt it was difficult. However, he actively participated in RT activities when he knew there would be an actual performance afterwards. On the first day, after the teacher announced there would be a real performance of RT, Kevin was then eager to choose characters. He asked the teacher how to read certain words from his lines, such as street, people, play, all, and handsome, and underlined his lines
immediately. During the interview, he showed his great expectation of and enthusiasm for the performance days.
Transcript (interview on May 26th):
Interviewer: In terms of reading the scripts, RT activities, performing, post-discussion, which is the most interesting and boring part?
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Kevin: I enjoyed performing pretty much, because we can express our
emotions while acting. If you perform well, then you will have other chances to perform in the future, just like soap operas. No, I don’t feel any of them was boring.
He was personally in love with acting. When he realized that all the reading material, RT activities and practice were purposeful for the final presentation, he became an active learner throughout each lesson.
4.2.2 Self-efficacy
Kevin also established his self-efficacy gradually. During the first class, Kevin wrote “I am the worst” on the handout that I gave the students to collect honor points.
That behavior might have been a sign that he did not have confidence in his English ability at the very beginning. However, he thought the RT instructions increased his confidence in English reading. (IT 0526) For instance, when the teacher asked the students to say what happened in the scripts and how the scripts were different from the original texts, Kevin raised his hand many times to answer. The scripts were not too difficult for him, because both of them were derived from the students’ textbooks.
He originally did not dare to speak English in regular classes, but he revealed that he was more willing to speak English in RT classes.
Transcript (interview on May 26th):
Interviewer: In which class, RT or the ordinary class, you are more willing to
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speak English?
Kevin: RT for sure. I dared not speak in the ordinary class, because my English was not as good as others. They often gain points, but I never.
Additionally, because Kevin was good at performing, other classmates praised him in many aspects, like reading accurately, loudly, and actively in post-discussion activities.
He also thought that he performed well in facial, body and voice expressions. (CO 0407)
Hence, Kevin gradually increased his self-efficacy because he thought that mastering the RT scripts was achievable. Also, his confidence was strengthened by his peers’ support, and he became more willing to speak English in front of others.
4.2.3 Autonomy
Readers Theater often empowered students to choose characters they like, and provided them chances to discuss different ways of interpreting lines. It seemed that Kevin enjoyed the autonomous atmosphere in RT activities. He pointed out that in the past, he did not have many chances to express himself in the class.
Transcript (interview on May 26th):
Interviewer: Do you want to receive RT instructions in the future? Why or why not?
Kevin: It seems that it’s impossible, because not every teacher will use RT instructions. For example, I used to speak in classes, but the teacher won’t
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allow us to express ourselves. Of course I planned to join the Dram Club, but I then gave it up.
Compared with the traditional English classes, RT provided him many chances to express himself. For example, after the teacher explained the scripts, he raised his hand and volunteered to be Mulan’s mom in script one, and Han (the young solider) in script two. When the teacher asked the students about their understanding of the scripts, Kevin immediately answered, “The script is different from the original story.
It’s not because Mulan’s father is too old, but because her father is sick. That’s why Mulan substitutes her father to be a solider.” (CO 0310) When the teacher discussed the lines and talked about Mulan’s papa, Kevin then asked the teacher “Can we say papa? I think we can only say father.” (CO 0317) The teacher explained to them that father was more formal than papa, and papa was more colloquial. In addition to asking questions spontaneously, Kevin also discussed the emotions and sequences of practicing with the teacher. For example, he thought one of Mulan’s emotions was weird because it suddenly changed from confident to pleasant. (CO 0324)
Furthermore, he suggested that the teacher let students read their own character’s lines, instead of practicing them together. The teacher praised his suggestion, and explained to him, after everyone became more familiar with the script, that they would read lines individually, according to their characters. (CO 0428) When the teacher chatted with Kevin’s previous remedial English teacher, he said that Kevin wasn’t involved in English class much before, and that students were not allowed to express themselves in class. (CO 0526) Nevertheless, most of the time there was not one single answer in
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terms of the interpretation of lines. Therefore, he was given more opportunities to express his own opinions in RT classes.
4.2.4 Relatedness
In terms of group activities, Kevin enjoyed group work while playing games, but sometimes he preferred to work alone when he wasn’t sure about the answers. He devoted himself to the characters while doing the role playing games, and he followed the instructions, which were to chat with his partners enthusiastically (SD 0324).
Aside from that, when they were playing a game called “follow the leader” to hone their concentration, Kevin discussed with his partners frequently to figure out who the leader was. He also wrote in his dairy that he liked those activities (SD 0331).
On the other hand, it seemed that Kevin sometimes did not enjoy group activities.
Since Kevin and Jenny’s (the other student in RT class) English were better than other students’, they were the group leaders of each team. One of the activities was
unscrambling the lines. Each group member got a piece of a sentence and they had to rearrange their parts according to the original script. When Jenny was discussing with her group members, Kevin checked the lines of the script on his own. When the teacher asked him to help other members, he said “I even couldn’t handle it myself, how could I help others?” (CO 0505). Also, once students were arranged in pairs to discuss the proper emotions of certain lines in the script, he then refused to discuss with others, and asked the teacher “Can I think it by myself?” (CO 0317). When he was uncertain about the answers, he preferred to work on his own instead of
discussing with others.
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To sum up, Kevin’s reading accuracy got improved in general, except for some pronunciation errors like those on the final consonants. He performed excellently in reading expression by varying his volume, pitch, and emotions to suit the characters in different contexts. Meanwhile, his phrasing and reading smoothness progressed gradually. What’s more, his reading speed increased, and he tried to manage different reading paces while performing various characters in different situations. Although he knew the importance of rhythmic reading, he was not capable of controlling his tempo and stress. On the other hand, Kevin’s learning motivation was increased, because he was interested in acting, and was able to relate the RT activities to actual
performances. Moreover, he became more confident in English reading, and enjoyed the autonomous learning atmosphere. Nevertheless, it seemed that sometimes he didn’t like to cooperate with others.
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Chapter Five DISCUSSION
5.0 Introduction
This chapter dealt with the issues that arose from the findings of this study. The research aimed at probing the influence of RT instructions on the young learner’s reading fluency and attitudinal changes toward English learning. The RT program lasted for three months in the remedial English courses. Kevin was chosen as the focal participant of the study because among the seven students, his learning attitudes changed most saliently during the RT intervention. Findings of the study were discussed based on the preceding literature to provide possible accounts for the answers to the two research questions.
5.1 Reading Fluency
Findings of the study supported the results of the existing research. As mentioned in chapter 2, RT was found to benefit students’ reading fluency in terms of accuracy, speed, and sometimes prosody (Li 2009, Liu 2013, Yeh 2013). The results in the present study were corresponded to Kevin’s case; his reading ability improved in terms of accuracy, expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and rate.
5.1.1 Accuracy
Accuracy refers to the ability to recognize, decode, and sound out words correctly (Ehri & McCormick, 1998). During the three months of RT instructions,
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Kevin’s word recognition and reading pronunciation improved after practicing, but he tended to drop final consonants.
Keehn et al. (2008) investigated the impact of RT on struggling eighth-grade readers, and found that their vocabulary acquisition doubled the comparison group’s.
Three reasons were provided, including students’ engagement in word recognition activities, their multiple exposures to the words in contexts, and the deep processing of words. In terms of Kevin’s case in the study, when he knew his characters, he then spontaneously asked how to read words like street, people, and handsome. Moreover, he asked the teacher to help him underline his lines. His spontaneous behavior
showed his involvement in learning unknown words, since he was responsible for reading the character. Students’ attention, focus, and engagement were essential components of effective vocabulary learning (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2000). Another reason was that Kevin underwent multiple exposures to those unfamiliar words.
Students dealt with the same scripts for four lessons. Each time they practiced, rehearsed, and performed over and over again. It was found that Kevin started to pick up unknown words around the second lesson, and became more and more familiar with them in the third lesson. Multiple exposures to words in contexts contributed a lot in terms of learning word meanings (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). A final reason was that students in RT had many chances to discuss the words in scripts. For example, Kevin discussed the emotion of certain lines and the pronunciation of words with group members. They not only had to recognize those words, but also had to figure out the proper interpretation of them. Rather than simply memorizing words, learners
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had to process words deeply and cognitively, which enriched their level of vocabulary acquisition (Nagy, 1988).
Additionally, Kevin tended to drop final consonants like the /t/ in art and the /k/
in like while reading them in sentences. English as a second language learners, or foreign language learners, often drop final consonants at an early learning stage. First, the different syllable structure between learners’ first and second languages might result in learning difficulties (Chan, 2010). Whereas English allows relatively complex consonant and vowel patterns, Chinese mainly employs CV structure, without consonant clusters in the pronunciation of a word. Since vocabulary in English like art was VCC, and like was CVC, Kevin (as a native speaker of Chinese) tended to simplify their syllabic structures and drop the final consonant in the coda position. Moreover, the degree of sonority and the place of word stress might also influence consonant deletion (Edwards, 2011; Gut, 2007). Voiceless consonants like /t/ and /k/ are relatively less sonorant than voiced consonants and vowels, so they might have a more favorable effect on deletion. On top of that, final consonant deletion occurs much more often in unstressed syllables and consonant clusters.
5.1.2 Expression and Volume
Kevin initially struggled with unfamiliar words, and gradually developed
prosodic reading by varying his emotion, pitch, intonation, volume in context, and by devoting himself to the characters.
Based on the automaticity theory (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974), human beings had limited cognitive recourses. If readers decoded words automatically, they had more
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resources for higher-level tasks such as grouping words and finding meaning. At the very beginning, Kevin spent more cognitive resources on lower-level tasks like word recognition, so he failed to demonstrate expressive reading. After practicing, he became more familiar with the lines and understood their meaning, so his cognitive resources were available for additional prosodic features while reading. Reading with expression often implied reading with comprehension (Dowhower, 1991). Although the study did not investigate the relationship between expressive reading and
comprehension, it could be inferred that Kevin comprehended the scripts more deeply because he had to interpret the readings with proper emotions and volume in various situations.
Aulls (1978) recommended three main instructions to improve students’
expressive reading, including repeated reading, text segmenting, and auditory modeling. The three elements were crucial components of Readers Theater. For instance, Kevin had numerous chances to repeatedly practice reading the scripts in meaningful ways so that he could change characters and discuss the meanings with others. On top of that, the teacher provided text-segmenting exercises in mini-lessons, and segmentation cues were provided and underlined on the scripts. Moreover,
students were able to hear teacher and group members’ modeling. Recent RT
experiments mainly contributed students’ significant expressive reading to the teacher or a more competent peer’s modeling (Keehn, 2003; Keehn et al., 2008; Roser et al., 2003).
Readers Theater was found to be helpful in enriching students’ tone variation and building their intonation capacities. Yeh (2013) researched the influence of RT
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instructions on third and sixth graders, and both groups improved significantly in terms of their reading speed, accuracy and intonation. The sixth graders performed better than the third graders, which might have been because the sixth graders
possessed a comprehensive phonics ability, which assisted their readings. Aside from that, students gained the most progress in emotional reading. On the other hand, their intonation changed most saliently in the final sentence position, and they easily made mistakes with yes-no questions. In Kevin’s case, he also varied his intonations saliently, especially in the final positions of sentences. For example, he raised his pitch to show exclamation, and raised his tone to show uncertainty. However, he didn’t make many mistakes with yes-no questions.
Finally, although Kevin made few errors during performances, it did not affect his overall expression. This might have to do with motherese. Fathers and mothers tended to use simpler and shorter utterances with exaggerated pitch and intonation variability. Although the motherese might be different from the original adult speech, infants still caught parents’ main readings of speech (Dowhower, 1991). The
phenomena illustrated that human beings heavily relied on prosodic cues rather than words. In Kevin’s case, audiences relied on his vocal expressions to understand his reading, so they might not have paid much attention to his minor pronunciation errors.
5.1.3 Phrasing
At first, Kevin paused randomly between words without the concept of phrasing.
After the teacher’s mini-lessons on the idea of phrasing, Kevin started to develop the awareness and ability to pause in appropriate places.
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The findings corresponded to those in previous research, that RT instruction assisted students’ phrasing, pacing and smoothness simultaneously (Clark et al., 2009;
Yeh, 2013). Dowhower and Lynn (1987) found that second graders who were slow readers had three inappropriate pausal intrusions (inappropriate hesitations within words or within syntactic units) per sentence before the intervention. After they practiced reading five stories, they significantly decreased the intrusion numbers in the practiced stories. In other words, they increased the length of appropriate chunking to facilitate their reading fluency. Being able to phrase appropriately implied that they understood both the syntactical and semantic boundaries of sentences.
Research evidence showed that students performed better in reading when they were provided with tangible cues to phrase boundaries in texts (Frase & Schwartz, 1979; Levasseur et al. , 2006; Rasinski, 1990, 1994). Although chunking skills were essential to students’ reading ability development, students often received insufficient instructions. Hence, Rasinski (2003) suggested that teachers first provide students with visible cues to practice. Segmenting could be visualized by means of line, indentation, slashes or blank spaces. Next, the teacher discussed the importance of phrasing with students. Third, the teacher read texts chorally with students, and then slightly exaggerated the phrases. Fourth, students formed groups or pairs to practice.
Finally, students read the same texts, without the phrase boundaries marked to help them. In the study, Kevin also received similar phrasing instructions in RT. For example, the teacher explained the marks of phrase boundaries in the scripts, and
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showed the importance of phrasing via activities. The teacher’s instructions and Kevin’s practices might account for improvements of his phrasing abilities.
5.1.4 Smoothness
At the very beginning, Kevin read with frequent pauses and false starts.
Gradually he picked up some words and read with multiple attempts, and then with occasional breaks and self-corrections. On the performance day he usually read conversationally, but tended to make small errors.
Generally speaking, Kevin’s reading smoothness increased, as he had numerous opportunities to practice and rehearse scripts in RT classes. The result was different from Yung’s (2006) research, that students did not gain statistically significant progress in reading smoothness. Unlike Yung’s finding, Yeh (2013) compared the RT effects on third and sixth graders’ oral reading after five weeks (20 lessons). Both of them were Taiwanese students who learned English as a foreign language. Before the experiment, the third graders paused 27 times on average during each reading, and the sixth graders paused 4.8 times. After the intervention, the third graders paused 2.9 times, and the sixth graders only paused once. They often paused while encountering multiple syllables or more complex words, which was similar to Kevin’s case, in that he paused frequently while reading handsome and favorite. Those words were more difficult for Kevin, which might have been because they had more difficult spelling, more syllables, or because the combination of sounds was hard to pronounce.
Keehn et al. (2008), in his research on how RT influences eighth-grade slow readers, found that students’ initial choppy reading resulted from hesitating to identify
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words, stopping to sound out words, or repeating portions of texts. The improvement of their fluidity might have been due to the teacher’s constant coaching on the
students’ reading smoothness. Those reasons might account for Kevin’s case, that the teacher usually reminded him of the places where he failed to read smoothly. Most of the time, the coaching occurred before or after his reading instead of during his
students’ reading smoothness. Those reasons might account for Kevin’s case, that the teacher usually reminded him of the places where he failed to read smoothly. Most of the time, the coaching occurred before or after his reading instead of during his