This study was designed to determine forensics students' ability to predict accurately how judges they knew from previous tournaments would rank them in rounds of competitive individual events. The study examined the following hypotheses: (1) contestants can predict how they will do in rounds of competition; and (2) contestants in prepared oral…

The bilingual booklet contains poems, song lyrics, thoughts, humorous stories, riddles, and games used by Katimavik, a nine-month volunteer community service learning and work experience program for 17 to 21-year-old Canadians. The first six pages of the document contain poems and song lyrics, some written in English, and some in French; the…

This journal issue presents teaching ideas based on the city of Chicago and the literary works of its citizens. The first article describes a combined social studies/English course based on the study of Chicago's influence on literature and history. Included is a course outline with required readings, class activities and assignments, an…

The seven exercises presented in this paper provide the initial foundation needed for exploration and experimentation through reader's theatre, the visual and oral dramatization of a literary work. Each of the exercises presented in the paper serves as a working blueprint to stimulate student awareness of the principles of staging reader's…

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…