Daniel was a seven-year-old boy from a very good school. He came from a well-to-do family and had all the latest toys. His parents also made sure that they crammed every minute of his time with tuition. On the surface, Daniel looked like he had everything he needed to succeed. Beneath the rosy facade however, was a very different picture: Daniel was miserable at school. He was frequently bullied, and he was failing in class.
Daniel was one of a group of students that intrigued us as speech therapists. This group of students struggle with reading and writing difficulties. Although these children look just like any other children in the classroom, a tell-tale sign is their inability to thrive in the classroom. Most of the time, these children give a blank look when they are asked questions about what they had read. If not they might write stories that are lacking in details, with incorrect grammar and simple sentences.
So it was in the spring of 2020, while the pandemic had just begun its ravaging campaign world-wide that we began mulling the solution to our own problem. On our caseload were several children like Daniel who had reading comprehension difficulties and weaknesses in their narrative skills. Despite months of intervention, these children were only showing modest gains in their ability to answer reading comprehension questions or to write a complete story. Even though we were perplexed by the issue, we were not surprised by the results considering the wide array of skills required for reading and writing.
Because many of these children had both reading comprehension and narrative difficulties, each of which has several areas to target, we had a lot of ground to cover for each child. Of course, we could take the approach of addressing each area of deficit one by one. Yet, we only had forty-five minutes each week to make a difference due to the limitation of our work-setting. There were so many areas to target that each session seems like several 100-metres sprints, leaving us and our little clients exhausted.
Furthermore, as our children got older, the academic requirement increased exponentially. Not only do we need to help our children but we also had to do it fast. How can we help our children avoid falling further behind while their classmates were making great strides everyday?
Just as we were about to despair, we came across the research of Stewig (1972) on using drama to improve reading comprehension. It was like a light had been shown on us. This was the missing ingredient we needed to tie everything together, and hence sparked the birth of Literacy Lab and our Dramatic Literacy Program.