Offered in response to the broad appeal of Charles Dickens's performance career to various disciplines, this annotated bibliography lists 40 resources concerned with Dickens's success as a performer interpreting his literary works. The resources are categorized under books, theses and dissertations, articles in scholarly journals, nineteenth…

Designed to help students respond in a positive way to poetry, poetry theater integrates dramatic technique with various aspects of reading, writing, analyzing, and reciting poetry. Poetry theater presentations require approximately five class periods to complete, allowing 45 minutes per class. The first class period should be devoted to choral…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) American drama between the world wars; (2) an emotion theory of stage fright; (3) the female androgyne in tragic drama; (4) creating and directing a musical…

Oral interpretation students from North Carolina State University (NCSU) have been involved in an innovative reading program with more than 6,000 elementary school children in the area. Reading teams from the university travel to schools to present readings to fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students as part of a program which was started in the…

The interpretation semiotic system that governs interpretation performance pertains to a distinct code of stylized conventions and includes all of the visual and auditory aspects that are generally salient to the characteristics of a performance. The selection of a particular convention for the interpretation of a specific text involves an act of…

In order to help students in oral interpretation or English classes comprehend the literature they read, this document outlines a question-answer-rehearse procedure which resolves the paradox of understanding before they perform a text. The twenty questions, formulated to provide a solid foundation for later explication and deeper study, are…

The acquisition of thinking skills is being stressed today by educators in all fields. There are, however, no clear and concise concepts of the different faces of comprehension which deal with higher mental processes. If the thinking skills are to be implemented, certain objectives must first be met: more research must be conducted in regard to…

The major purposes of this study were to describe the responses of adolescent readers to three short stories; to describe the interpretive processes they employed; to identify their reading and interpreting difficulties; and to discover what relationship existed between the readers' stated awareness of an interpretive process and both the…

The "indeterminate" quality of Oates' writing is an asset to the oral interpreter. It demands reader participation and allows the text to become real. The imagery of violence, however, presents special problems. Upon encountering violence in the writing, the reader may experience what Leon Festinger terms "cognitive…

If dramatic characters are to be rendered "three dimensional" in performance, both the dramatist and the actor/interpreter must create them with proper attention to the physical, sociological, and psychological aspects of character. If oral interpreters understand these dimensions of a particular character, they can analyze such elements as…

Fourteen plays were designed to evaluate fourth grade children's abilities to respond to reading plays both with and without oral accompaniment. The study involved 378 children, representing a cross section of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, each of whom read half of each play silently and the other half while listening to a taped…

This book provides teachers, children, and parents with knowledge about children's literature and the oral interpretation of it. The procedures, suggestions, and resources in the book are intended to develop oral interpretation skills in the young reader and to assist the adult reader in improving his own skills. The content is divided into five…

The 12 articles in this issue of "Indiana English Journal" are concerned with drama and oral interpretation in the classroom. Titles of articles are: "Up in the Tree, Down in the Cave, and Back to Reading: Creative Dramatics"; "Pantomime: The Stepping Stone to Drama"; "The Living Literature of Readers' Theatre"; "Do-It-Yourself Drama"; "Drama for…

Readers theater is a storytelling device that stimulates the imagination and promotes all of the language arts. Readers theater is an oral interpretation of a piece of literature read in a dramatic style. It involves and motivates students, energizes the language arts program, and stimulates learning. Geared for children in grades 1-4, this book…