Fluency and Acting

I just woke up, so this may not be the revelation it feels like now.

In my dream, I was at some kind of celebration for the newly relocated Tampa Zoo, with which somehow our research group was involved. K and S had just been introduced on stage and now the gathered crowd was watching a video on a large screen on stage. I was backstage watching it. Some of the people in it were actors - I recognized Dean Winters - but others clearly weren't. There was an older woman speaking, and she was really bad, like you sometimes see in community theater, not at all able to make her words sound like natural speech. As I was waking up, I thought about this woman and why she couldn't act. It's like she had no awareness of the difference between how she sounded and how people normally speak. That's weird because, of course, she's heard, and produced, countless hours of natural sounding speech all through her life. But, she's never been directed to examine the differences. The distinctive features of natural speech have never been pointed out to her.

I thought about A's review in class this week, talking about the components of fluency - pitch, juncture, and flow. That woman was acting the same way a poor reader reads - with no fluency, no understanding of how the ideas are represented in the text. Only she wasn't reading, she had actually memorized it without connecting the underlying thoughts. Or, she had memorized it, connected the thoughts, but never considered the distinctive features of fluent, natural speech.

When we teach movie-making to kids, we touch on acting as a discrete set of skills because they are the actors in their own movies. When we do that, we need to use language that ties the ideas that we are teaching back to reading. We need to teach them to attend to the distinctive features within the text that cue pitch, juncture, and flow. We can do this the same way we teach reading fluency in the classroom. Let me qualify that by saying, we can use the engaging and effective strategies that are sometimes used in the classroom to teach fluency. The key is that, in the context of movie-making, they have a real purpose to learn how to read fluently. They want their movie to be good, so the fluency strategies that we are teaching serve the purpose of helping them make their movie better. In the process, we will be helping them become better readers.

This is another way in which the kinds of projects that we do can support the acquisition of traditional literacies. This connection has probably already been made in research about Process Drama.