Second Language Learning through Drama

Practical Techniques and Applications

Joe Winston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415597791
• eBook ISBN: 9781136645815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Drama is increasingly being recognised as a valuable pedagogy for language learning as it can harness children's imaginations and stimulate their desire to communicate. Second Learning Language through Drama draws on current theories of additional and foreign language learning and illustrates through practical case studies how drama can be used to support the four key skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Drawing on the work of an international group of practitioners who are all highly experienced in using drama for the purpose of second language learning, the book clearly explains key drama conventions and strategies and outlines the innovative ways they have been used to create enjoyable and stimulating classroom activities that allow for multiple ways of learning.

Throughout the book the emphasis is on making language learning accessible and relevant to children and young people through creative, physically active and playful approaches. The strategies described are all highly flexible and readily adaptable to different teaching contexts. Specific themes include:

• Using stories and drama to motivate learners at all levels
• Drama, language learning and identity
• Assessment opportunities through process drama
• Issues of language learning and cultural empowerment
• Digital storytelling
• Film & drama aesthetics

Second Language Learning through Drama will be of great interest to those studying on undergraduate and postgraduate courses and will serve as a highly valuable text to practitioners looking to incorporate the approaches described into their lessons and classroom activities.

CHAPTER

1

‘Dramatic’ Language
Learning in the Classroom

Li-Yu Sabina Chang

The introduction has briefly sketched some of the theoretical foundations that underpin the practice outlined in the following chapters. This chapter, while echoing some of the points made in the introduction, points to additional theoretical and research evidence to argue for the effectiveness of drama pedagogy specifically in the area of second language learning. In doing so, I make reference throughout to some of the common strategies or conventions that drama teachers make use of to structure their lessons. A glossary of these terms can be found at the end of this book for the benefit of non-drama specialists.

Learning through drama

Drama is unique in its creative and symbolic use of space, time and human presence. In drama, time can be altered, space changed and identities shifted. By means of drama conventions, an imagined context can be created in which the class and teacher are able to suspend their disbelief “in order to pretend, as a group, that they are other people, in another place, in another time” (Neelands, 1984, p. 46). The transformations of space, time and identities make it possible for students to “try out and experiment with new ideas, concepts, values, roles and language in action” as Neelands (1984, p. 6) suggests. In addition, they can put themselves in others’ shoes and make decisions in a non-threatening dramatic world without worrying about the unpleasant consequences their actions in real life might bring to them. Participating in drama activities can help develop children's personal resources such as self-confidence, self-esteem, social skills, communication, emotional resilience, empathy, physical expressiveness, collaborative and cooperative skills and processes (Pascoe et al., 2004, p. 122). As I shall now go on to argue, most of these benefits of drama pedagogy coincide with key factors that contribute to children's learning in general and to second language acquisition in particular.

Multiple ways of learning

Drama, as a multimodal art form combining visual, aural, verbal and kinaesthetic languages, offers students “different points of entry into the work and different ways of becoming involved” (Nicholson, 2000, p. 179). Engaging in multiple ways of learning enables children to fix the learning experience more firmly in their minds. For instance, those children who respond particularly well to visual stimuli or who have good spatial awareness will benefit from drama activities such as creating still images and sculpting partners. These can also be enjoyed kinaesthetically, by children who like to touch, move around and manipulate objects. Miming and acting out may well attract them into taking part. Drama conventions such as voices in the head, conscience alley, hot seating and sound collage have an auditory appeal for those who are good at verbal exchanges and mimicking sounds. From these examples, we can see that drama can stimulate the visual, kinaesthetic and auditory aspects of learning and therefore allow more children to feel confident as learners as a variety of “points of entry” are being addressed.

Drama and oracy

Talking helps us clarify our thoughts and understand our feelings. As an old saying goes, “How can I know what I think, until I hear what I say?” Kempe and Holroyd (2004, p. 5) make it clear that “It is through the act of articulating ideas that those ideas become crystallised.” Drama is a collectively constructed, imagined world that demands a positive and supportive working atmosphere. Students need to take part in group discussions and, as a result, can learn and gain support from their peers. Moreover, the playful nature of drama is conducive to preparing learners to articulate their thoughts and take risks. However, second language teachers will often complain about the difficulty of getting students to respond in class. Some will fill the silence with their own talk because the students’ non-participation in classroom activities and discussion unnerves them. So what is it that makes students feel inhibited when it comes to speaking in the language class-room? A brief statement from The British Council-Hornby Seminars in English Language Teaching (2006) provides one sensible answer: “Students often do not have a real reason to speak because the tasks do not motivate them or do not require them to say anything which they find meaningful.” If this is the case, it is insufficient for teachers to provide pupils with superficial contexts designed only for practising language skills. Byron (1986) draws a fine line between the real demands of language use and the time spent by learners overtly practising “skills” targeted at but distant from a time when they might need these skills for real. Emphasising the importance of the demands of the “as if” situation instead of the language skills, he explains:

as human beings, we have a marked propensity to become absorbed in an “as if” world, so that it begins to feel real: not real in the sense that it is actually happening, but real in the sense that the problems faced and the outcomes matter to the participant.

(p. 126)

To break students’ silence, then, teachers need to engage them emotionally; and within the context of drama, this means that teachers must make the dramatic situation matter to their students. The success of language development through drama depends on whether students “care enough about the problem in the drama to try and meet the challenges (including the language challenge) it offers” (Byron, 1986, p. 127).

Role-taking and role-creating in educational drama give students a chance to put themselves in others’ shoes in an imagined context. Not only does the pretending bring about an immediate need for students to communicate, it also has the potential to change the power structure and interaction patterns in the classroom. Take teacher-in-role for example. When taking a role, the teacher needs to go beyond the functions he/she usually performs as “an instructor, model and resource” (Kao & O'Neill, 1998, p. 2) so that students can use language creatively and respond appropriately to how the teacher behaves and speaks in role. O'Toole (2008) suggests a number of roles, both in high- or low-status positions, which teachers can play in order to put pressure on students’ language output. His suggestions include being someone who has information but is reluctant or unable to deliver it coherently; someone who is in need of information or help; someone who drops a bombshell but takes no responsibility; or someone who is a provocateur (p. 26). This strategy also serves to draw the class together, “in listening, thinking, and building the event with speculation and anticipation as they look for clues to the emerging dramatic world in which they participate” (Liu, 2002, p. 68).

In drama class, a fictional world is constructed but this can only happen through mutual participation, a fact that can provide students with a sense of ownership and the motivation to contribute verbally in order to keep the drama going and extend its scope and depth. In a well-designed dramatic situation, the learners’ need for communication tends to overcome their fear of linguistic inadequacy so that they are able to make the best use of the language skills they already possess (Somers, 1994, p. 139). Drama is a key way to maximise opportunities for pupils’ oracy, thus paving the way for developing their literacy.

Drama and literacy

Becoming literate

Definitions of literacy range widely. For some, literacy is simply the ability to read and write various types of text to meet the basic need for communication. For others, being literate has much broader connotations and involves a capacity for manipulating language and utilising modes of discourse for a specific purpose and audience. As Corden (2000) puts it, “literacy is a problematic concept, dependent on a number of factors and what a particular culture or society deems to be important and relevant” (p. 28). How we define literacy will influence how we teach it. So, before exploring how drama can facilitate its development, some of the meanings underlying the term, literacy, need first of all to be untangled.

If being literate is equated with being able to read and write, then literacy teaching will entail the mastery of a set of discrete linguistic skills which enable students to decode meanings from texts as well as produce them. In such an approach, literacy teaching will concentrate on the imparting of knowledge of three cueing systems — graphophonic (letter/ sound relationships), syntactic (grammar and structure of sentences) and semantic (meaning of the text). The danger here, as Winston (2004) has pointed out, is that, if we regard language merely as a body of skills to be mastered and deployed, then we are likely to divorce language exercises from context, “as it is the skill rather than the experience that is seen as important” (p. 20). This is not to reject the importance of skills-based literacy; Cameron (2001) has argued that “learning the detail of how texts are written and can be understood is crucial to children's educational and personal development” (p. 125). It should not, however, be considered as the one and only all-important aspect in the teaching of literacy. Literacy is about language and the cueing systems are only part of language.

Halliday (1970) has proposed an influential theoretical framework in which language is analysed in terms of four strata: Context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology-Graphology. He maintains that language performs three metafunctions:

• Ideational function: used for the expression of content;
• Interpersonal function: used to maintain and establish social relations;
• Textual function: used to provide cohesive relations within spoken or written texts.

(p. 143)

He goes on to argue that social context, a decisive factor in one's choice of register, includes three situational variables:

• Field: an ongoing social activity or a subject matter of a text;
• Tenor: the relations among the participants;
• Mode: physical medium adopted for communication including the channel and the rhetorical mode.

(Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p. 12)

These three variables which realise context are correspondingly related to the three metafunctions of language. That is, the ideational function is effectuated by means of the field, the interpersonal by means of the tenor and the textual by means of the mode. Halliday's theoretical framework suggests that language is a socially constructed system. Viewing language in a social semiotic way, he suggests that it is essential to bring contexts of situation into focus in order to understand the functions of specific linguistic structures and examine meaning potential. He writes:

We do not experience language in isolation ... but always in relation to a scenario, some background of persons and actions and events from which the things which are said derive their meaning. This is referred to as the “situation”, so language is said to function in “contexts of situation” and any account of language which fails to build in the situation as an essential ingredient is likely to be artificial and unrewarding.

(Halliday, 1978, pp. 28—29)

According to this view, being literate is a more complex concept which goes far beyond the acquisition of a set of decontextualised coding and decoding skills. It involves the ability to produce and interpret texts in a given context where the realisation of meaning potential deeply depends upon one's social and cultural identity. The importance of contextualisation in language learning has also been stressed by Donaldson. She contends, “the child does not interpret words in isolation — he interprets situation” (Donaldson, 1978, p. 88). On the subject of second language learning, Brown (2001) also strongly advises teachers to take account of contextual considerations in teaching children. As a result, the context of a situation should not be separated from literacy teaching.

Drama as a context for reading

Learning to read is a multifaceted and complicated process. Written texts differ from spoken language, which is normally accompanied by paralinguistic features and interpersonal exchanges that aid the child's comprehension of the utterance. The reader needs to discover and construct the context embedded in the print on the page which is “featureless and does nothing visually to capture the attention or involve the emotions” (Reid, 1991, p. 73). For beginners, according to Reid (1991), “there is loss and change in the transfer to print — loss of immediacy of relevance, loss of vividness, loss of support in the search for meaning” (p. 73). Facing the written text alone, readers will need to rely chiefly on their background knowledge and decoding skills in order to infer meaning from the text.

Young learners of a foreign language need more visual and aural assistance in order to understand a text. Byron (1986) observes that young learners in general are “stronger at reading action, or words-embedded-in-action, than they are at reading words alone” (p. 79). Images, both still and moving, play an influential part in children's perception of meaning. Acknowledging the importance of the visual in young people's lives and the increasing use of multimodal texts in today's technological world, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) urge that children's ability to use elements of “visual grammar” should be developed further at school by encouraging them to “actively experiment with the representational resources of word and image, and with the ways in which they can be combined” (p. 113). Drama makes the literary world more accessible for children because it permits them to turn the abstract written words into concrete images and to construct meaning from the text through collective as well as individual experience. Through drama, children can be encouraged to enter a fictional world created by an author, physically taking on roles in order to explore what it is like to be a character in a story. This emotional engagement can motivate them to keep on reading and may well encourage them no longer to see the written text as dull and featureless print on paper but as the entry point into an enjoyable, lively, imaginary world. However, the challenge for teachers here is to find suitable stories that motivate students to explore and use the target language

Skilful writers often leave gaps in the text for readers to fill in. The teacher can use drama activities such as hot seating, thought tracking, interviews, interrogations and gossip circle (Neelands, 2004, pp. 100—105) for children to mine the potential that these gaps present. Where in the story, for example, are there unrecorded conversations, unmentioned thoughts, off-the-page scenarios, possible but undescribed meetings (Grainger, 2004, p. 96)? In exploring these “creative gaps” dramatically, children are able to enter the inner lives of characters and gain “a sense of co-authorship of the text and collaboration with the author” (Baldwin & Fleming, 2003, p. 19). Such experiences can also, as Winston (2004) has pointed out, serve “to stimulate higher order skills of inferring meaning from text, of critically engaging with it and, where appropriate, of expressively articulating it” (p. 26).

Drama as a catalyst for writing

Writing requires a clear Audience, Purpose and Topic, to be “APT” (Cameron, 2001, p. 156), if it is to avoid being reduced to tasks of skill-building aimed solely at mastering the rules of punctuation, spelling, grammar and writing structure. This toolkit approach “will produce competent, though, disengaged, writers” ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Second Language Learning through Drama
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Second and Additional Language Learning through Drama
• 1 ‘Dramatic’ Language Learning in the Classroom
• 2 Using Stories and Drama to Teach English as a Foreign Language at Primary Level
• 3 Theatre, Language Learning and Identity (1): Empowering Additional Language Learners through Theatre in Education
• 4 Theatre, Language Learning and Identity (2): Empowering Additional Language Learners through Classroom Drama Projects
• 5 Drama and Languages Education: Authentic Assessment through Process Drama
• 6 Accessing Traditional Tales: The Legend of Bukit Merah
• 7 Insights From a Drama-EAL Classroom: Using Drama with English Language Learners in a Canadian High School
• 8 Using Drama to Enrich School-Based Assessment in the Hong Kong Secondary School English Language Classroom
• 9 Second Language Learning and Cultural Empowerment: Teaching Shakespeare in Taiwan
• 10 Digital Storytelling, Drama and Second Language Learning
• 11 Film and Drama Aesthetics for Additional Language Teaching
• Afterword
• Glossary of Drama Conventions
• Index