.png)
Generating good content for a blog can be a bit of a challenge, which is why I’m grateful to my playwright friend, Dana Hall, who decided to use her platform to promote the importance of reading plays in school. And I thought: “What better place to share this wisdom than on The June Bug Center blog.”
So, why should students read plays?
Reading Fluency
"Reading fluency" is reading a text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression. Fluent readers can understand the text in front of them without stopping to decode the words. It’s a key component of reading comprehension because when a student reads fluently, they can focus on understanding the deeper meaning of the words on the page.
Because plays are told primarily through dialogue, they encourage expressive reading. The conversational nature of these works helps students recognize the natural flow of conversations, and this helps students naturally practice with emotion and proper pacing. And because plays often require repeated reading to memorize lines, students actively improve their word recognition and reading speed.
Language Proficiency
I know we all balked–not me, of course–during English class when it was time to crack open a new Shakespeare play. However, “he writes pretty straightforward stuff when you get down to it” (Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias).
Reading plays can expose your students to different languages–even if everything they read is in English. Within our language, there’s been so much evolution that’s led to hundreds of dialects and idioms. Playwrights often use rich, diverse language. By reading plays, students are exposed to different styles of dialogue, vocabulary, and sentence structures that can enhance their language skills.
Promotes Collaboration and Communication
While being a playwright is a solitary activity, the act of bringing it to life is anything but. When it comes to doing a staged reading or mounting a full production, plays are a collaborative experience. Writers speak with directors, directors coach the actors, and the stage crew keeps everything from falling to pieces.
Even in a classroom setting, reading a play becomes a collaborative exercise as one person cannot simply read all the parts. Well, they could, but where’s the fun in that?
Learn Empathy and Understanding
When we ask students to read a play inside or outside of the classroom, we’re asking them to step into someone else’s shoes. Many plays feature characters from different backgrounds, cultures, or with differing viewpoints. By interacting with these perspectives, students gain a deeper understanding of lives that may be different from their own, promoting open-mindedness and tolerance.
When I wrote New Year’s Eve at the Stop-n-Go, my goal was to create a nostalgic piece that high schoolers and college students could really connect with as they were playing characters their own age.
The struggle of not knowing what or where you want to be when you grow up is a universal experience we’ve all experienced. While there are some references that even peers my age don’t get, the overall story is one that has kept people talking and connecting for days after it ended.
And to me, that’s what reading and seeing plays is all about. Connection. Finding common ground to meet one another. And I believe in it so much, I'm linking a PDF of Stop-n-Go for anyone looking for a place (that's not Shakespeare) to get started.
New Year's Eve at the Stop-n-Go at Northern Kentucky University, 2022. No, I didn't write this whole post to promote myself. How dare you accuse me of something that I would totally do. You'll understand when you have children.
Comments