Novels, articles, debates, textbook reading, and short stories can all provide excellent sources. If a teacher happens to be using a play or dialogue, these are obviously adaptable into scripts for Readers Theater. Five to ten minute scripts often work best. Scripts may add a narrator to help introduce the scene, characters, and action. In transforming books, articles, and texts into scripts, the only limitation is that students must be working with literature that contains or lends itself to dialogue.
Most novels abound with episodes of characters conversing.
Students need only to choose a passage with a sufficient number of characters that they want to depict. The passage may either be edited or embellished by the students to work the scene into a suitable form for presentation. The Unicorn in the Garden . The police looked at thepsychiatrist and thepsychiatrist looked at the police. At a solemn signal from the psychiatristthe police leaped from theirchairs and seized the wife.