SPEAKING: Insights into Dramatic Text for Classroom Reading (original) (raw)

The text of a short story, novel, or drama as literary works is a created one, yet it offers a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted. The students as a reader can discover their thoughts, feelings, customs, and possessions: what they buy, believe in, fear, enjoy; how they speak and behave behind closed door. As one of literary works, reading drama is for most students a difficult and unfamiliar task. One problem that can be experienced by the readers of dramatic text is in visualizing the stage and what is going in there. Appropriate approaches, therefore, are needed to have the students see dramatic text as a speech event rather than a mute text on the page. Hence, this writing is aiming to highlight an approach in reading a speech event in drama called SPEAKING (settings, participants, ends, act sequences, keys, instrumentalities, norms, and genres) proposed by Hymes (1972). It is an analytic and descriptive tool to the analysis of spoken discourse which offers insights into dramatic text for classroom reading to help the students have a considerable exercise of the imagination to make the dramatic text come alive. Keywords: Dramatic Text, SPEAKING, Classroom Reading