Many thanks to the staff at East & West Book Company in Taipei for making my visit to Taiwan possible. Over a two week period I conducted 7 Readers Theater seminars in 6 different cities, met hundreds of interesting and talented EFL teachers, and even got to see quite a bit of their beautiful country.
For photos of this extraordinary trip, please click HERE.
East & West Book Company can be found online at: http://www.ewbook.com/
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Hello EFL Teachers!
If you are looking for a script to help teach the alphabet to EFL students, this script may help. It features the first 10 letters of the alphabet, uses rhythm, rhyme, and a repetitive chorus. You can use from 4 readers to 30 or more. Please click HERE.
More Scripts for EFL Teachers:
Here are two more scripts created from the vocabulary words and phrases in Lessons One and Six in "Enjoy 1: Teachers' Manual" from the Bureau of Education in Tainan City.
For the script How Are You Today? please click HERE.
For the script May I Borrow Your Marker? please click HERE.
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Many thanks to EFL teacher Daniel Yang for the following:
In Taiwan, students have very limited vocabularies and limited knowledge of sentence patterns. In addition, (EFL) teachers have a very tight schedule in terms of the curriculum they need to complete. In elementary schools, a period or class is 40 minutes and we have only 2 English classes per week. In each class, we EFL teachers have to cover things like phonics, sight words, and listening/speaking. Therefore, RT can only take up part of the class (usually 15-20 minutes per class). To see my lesson plan for introducing, rehearsing, and performing a RT script using cooperative groups, please click HERE.
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More EFL RT Information from Daniel Yang in Taiwan:
I received my education mostly in Toronto and Vancouver, and I remembered doing RT in one of my junior high school English classes. I had fun then. After coming back to Taiwan, I thought it would be nice if my students could experience RT and enjoy reading as much as I did. However, things didn’t go as I planned. Due to the limited classes and limited vocabularies that students had, I found it was difficult to fulfill both the course requirement and RT.
At that time, I knew that re-writing the materials in the textbook into RT scripts was the only way that I could accomplish both. As an experiment, I did so with my grade four students.
Most of these students had learned English for one year and a half in the elementary school, while a few had a head start and received extra English classes outside of the school for more than two years. Their reading levels were mixed, as some of them could read fluently and others were struggling with the materials in the textbook. However, all of the students had some knowledge on phonics (CVC, blends, digraphs, and long vowels); they knew approximately 100-120 sight words.
After trying RT for one semester, students’ motivation in reading and fluency improved. I could see that they were starting to enjoy reading.
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Scripts from the How & Why Stories:
www.beautyandthebeaststorytellers.com
While in Taiwan, I promised the EFL teachers in my RT seminars that I would include in this website the 6 short scripts adapted from "How & Why Stories: World Tales Kids Can Read and Tell" by Mitch Weiss and Martha Hamilton. Here they are:
The Turtle Who Couldn't Stop Talking: click HERE.
The Mill at the Bottom of the Sea: click HERE.
Why Ants Are Found Everywhere: click HERE.
How the Tiger Got His Stripes: click HERE.
Two Brothers, Two Rewards: click HERE.
Why Parrots Only Repeat What People Say: click HERE.
For more information about "How and Why Stories" by Mitch Weiss and Martha Hamilton, please visit their website at: www.beautyandthebeaststorytellers.com
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For those who requested it, here is the entire PowerPoint Presentation from the Readers Theater Seminars in Taiwan, Aug, 2005. Please click HERE.
