The school district in Daejeon used to have an inter-school English contest, but apparantly people got “too competative” and the stress and time commitment was too much for the parents, teachers, and students, so the contest was called off this year. However, my principal wanted our students to have an English contest within the school (as did Clarke’s) so one of my co-teacher’s suggested that instead of speeches and skits, we do Reader’s Theater. This is a technique of reading a story that is in the format of a script. Students stand in a line and face their audience; they mostly act with their voices and maybe a few props or gestures.
To put it to the test, Ms. Ann wrote a Reader’s Theater script for the fifth graders to try in class. We’ve made one every chapter since!
We put together a proposal for the Reader’s Theater English Competition, incorporating evidence on the efficacy of Reader’s Theater for improving ESL students’ vocabulary and comfort level in English. Since I found myself with too much planning time (said no American teacher, ever), I volunteered to set aside some time to help the contestants practice. We announced the competition in our English classes, showed some examples we found on line, and asked them to turn in a script in 10 days.
The next 6 weeks of practice and preparation were a little bit hectic and stressful at times, but overall it was a really great experience. I got to know some of my students better and I had a great time helping them spruce up classic fairy tales (what if Little Red Riding Hood lived in 2015…in Korea?!?!?). The competition was almost postponed/canceled because of MERS (it was June 9th), but they decided that as long as only the participants came it wasn’t any different from being in school, and we had class that day. Having pulled some scheduling gymnastics to get every team time for a dress rehearsal the past week, I was really thankful it went on as scheduled.
We had 6 teams of 5th graders and 10 teams of 6th graders. Although the 6th graders were noticeably better at reading through their scripts in the first few practices, the fifth grader soon overtook them with sheer effort and enthusiasm. On the day of the contest, the 5th grade teams showed up in full costumes, where most of the sixth grade teams hadn’t gone much farther than name tags…hehe…I had promised all the 5th graders not to worry about the sixth grade teams because they were being judged separately (we planned to pick a winner from each grade) but turns out it was the sixth graders that should have been scared!
Anyway, here are some pictures from the day of. I’ll work on getting a video clip up, but the camera was in the back and it’s a little hard to understand!
Editing Scripts
Practicing in the English room after School
Team pictures (every team had a picture on our bulletin board to get people psyched!)
The Day of the Competition
Daejeon Days 