Readers Theatre as a Way to Increase Motivation and Spanish Reading and Oral Fluency

Abstract

Due to the fact that learning Spanish as a Second Language (2L) can be a stressful and difficult process for college students, Readers Theatre (RT) is a strategy to motivate them to read more texts in Spanish, improving their oral and reading fluency and lowering their affective filters. RT has been proven to motivate students to voluntarily review the texts at home to help them retain better the information along with the gestures and repetition of the performance. Also, RT helps students to improve their comprehension and accuracy, negotiating meaning through collaborative learning and implementing the teachers´s feedback. The four books selected for the Common Issues topic are interesting so students can feel motivated to read in Spanish and the four Classic Fairy Tales books will also help them because they experience less anxiety when they talk about topics that are familiar to them. The implementation of this project needs to be assessed in the future and complemented with a rubric to evaluate RT in the Spanish classroom, as there is a lack of studies and materials in Spanish. Also, the benefits of RT could be implemented in other 2L teaching.