Motivating Performers and Audience to Combat Prejudice Through Readers’ Theater

Abstract

There are very few well-contextualized references to civil rights and activism found in Swiss materials and what learners bring home in their EFL lessons is often over-generalized, if learnt about at all. In local language instruction in Swiss secondary school history lessons, there are occasional units on the United States, but these are often lacking in focus on movements and activism, they focus on basic historical dates and events and do not cover the depth necessary to even plant seeds in learners’ minds to take their understanding even further. Thus, the need to better contextualize in the hopes of creating a deeper understanding of events and of humanity can well be done through current materials such as those being produced for accepting Black Lives Matter not just as a movement but as a standard of living, and another way that is of readers’ theater – an extremely approachable tool for content and language teaching in Swiss secondary and tertiary English language classrooms.