Reading comprehension, the ability to understand and retain the details, sequence, and meaning from written material, is a basic skill that is one of the critical elements of any primary-level education. There has been a discussion going on between people that argue that subjects as arts, should make place for the ‘basic skills’ so children can concentrate on what is more ‘important’. Others argue that there is an empirical link between arts education and basic academic achievement.

The Reading Comprehencion through Drama program was developed on the assumption that drama could be an effective medium for teaching young readers. It is suggested that a critical component of reading comprehension is the ability to create a “gestalt,” which “is created by the visualization of the whole … it is the ability to create and inmagine whole” (Bell, 1991 pp. 247-248). Those students who comprehend clearly what they read are able to visualize the secens they have read. Strong readers can visualize the details of a story assembled as a whole rather than try to hold on to the many parts seperately. This visualising of the story is exactly what I noticed in my students when I made the soundscape with them. They really understood the whole story and could visualise (and hear) it. This way they could interpreted the story in sounds instead of in words.

The similarity between imagery-based instruction methods and the use of drama as a teaching technique is of particular interest in the context of using drama as a medium for teaching reading. Like the imagery-based learning methods that Bell described, drama requires actors to visualize (or create an image of) a scene and all of its elements so that it creates a meaningful story.

Memory and cognition

The essence of reading comprehension, which is highly dependent on memory, is the ability to store and retrieve information from writen text. Some research suggest that memory for visual informtion is stronger than memory for written information. If reading instruction can be made less dependent on memory of text and focus instead on visual images described in the story, then readers are lkely to store, retain, and recall more about what they read.

Meaning-based memory

Meaningful information is better remembered than meaningless information. Specifically, propositional representation are used to represent meaningful information about an event, story, ore scene. Reading comprehension likely is based on the ability to encode and retrieve the basic building blocks (propositions) of sentences and relates the meaning withn them to scenes and stories from a text.

To apply those finding to teaching reading comprehension, which relies on memory, students must learn to segment the meaningful pieces of a story and to understand the meaningful relationships between the segments that create the whole story. That approach parallels the one that actors use to re-create a scene. One must be albe to visualise each piece of the story (as well as the pieces together) to accurately represent them.

Thus, the ability to visualise the secne in the text, a skill that can be developed through drama-based instruction, may be a useful tool for both coding the propositions within the text and combining the meaningfully to re-create the details of the story.

Elaboration

Research suggests that human memory can be enhanced greatly by elaborating on information to be remembered. Elaboration involves a deeper level of proccessing information, which has a positive effect on memory. Memory in reading can be enhanced by creating a vivid image of the scene described in a sentence. Thus, providing students with the opportunity to elaborate on the text they are reading, especially if it involves vivid visual representation, is likely to improve their recall and comprehension of the material.

Taken together, the research on memory and imagery suggest that reading comprehension can be improved by helping students a) create visual images of what they read, b) break down stories into their smallest meaningful components (or propositions) and c) elaborate on what they read so they can process information more deeply. All of those characteristics are common to drama-based instruction.

Thus there seems to be ample theoretical and empirical support for the notion that drama can improve reading comprehension.

There were five steps to make the story into drama:

1. Students silently read the story
2. The artis/leader reads the same story aload (so any weak/nonreader can participate)
3. Students identify specific elements of the story
4. Students re-create (via props) the elements identified in step 3
5. Students re-tell the story using props to dramtise the elements.

Students are guided in the recreation of the story in four stages. The first stage involved the story elements. After reading the story (step 1 and 2), students created symbols to represnet the different story elements necessary to re-tell the story. Thy needed to created inmagine for in ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ elements of the story. In the second stage, studenst were asked to devide the story in beginning, middle and end, and identify those parts of the story and re-tell the narrative using three-panel illustrtion to draw each element. In the third stage, the perceptions elements, ‘see’, ‘smell’, ‘taste’, ‘hear’, and ‘thought’ were used. In this stage, rather than retelling the story with paper images, students re-told the story by acting out the scene. In the final stage, students explored the evalution elements of ‘interpretation’, ‘critique’, and ‘opinion’. In this stage, students were interviewed as if they were one of the characters in the story. The students responded to the interview by inferring (elaborating) the character’s likely response according to what they read about the character’s motiviations, actions, and personality.

Classes that used this approach for reading comprehension did show an improvement in reading skills. I think this method can be really well used, since it engages also the poor readers. This way, reading can be enjoyable for everybody in the class. I noticed the same when making the soundscape in my class. Even children that could not read yet, were engaged in the story, and new when it was their turn to act, so they new the story without reading it. Visualisation of the scenes and words of the story, also helps with learning new words. It is easier to connect a sound (new word) to a picture than to a text.