Performance Text

Performance is a great way to provide an authentic reason for rereading text. Students will love sharing their favorite poems, jokes, and stories with each other. Performing text will build students' motivation and enjoyment of literature, in addition to fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension abilities.

Performing text does not mean that students have to memorize their reading. It is perfectly fine for students to read while performing their text for the class!

How Performing Text Can Foster Fluency in Struggling Readers

Performing or presenting text to others is an authentic reason to read and reread a story, poem, joke, or play. Rereading has proven to build students' fluency and confidence in reading. In addition, students draw on their comprehension abilities in order to bring a character to life or convey the mood or humor of a text. Performance reading is also very flexible. Students can tell jokes, read a poem, act out a comic strip, share a tongue twister, recite a speech, or perform a dramatic interpretation of a story. All students can be successful when sharing an appropriate text that they know well.

Types of performance text

Student Led Read Aloud

• Book buddies
• Book talks
• Student-recorded books (see tape assisted reading)

Reader's Theater

Poetry Performance

Teacher Tips

How do students perform text in your class? Submit your ideas here!

Resources and Links

Books

Wham! It's a Poetry Jam: Discovering Performance Poetry by Sara Holbrook (Boyds Mill Press, 2002)

Readers theater for building fluency: Strategies and scripts for making the most of this highly effective, motivating, and research-based approach to oral reading by Jo Worthy (Scholastic, 2005)