(Learning English) Be An Actor

As teachers we are always looking for ways to improve our classes and motivate our students. Yet, teaching conditions may not be as ideal as we would like them to be. Sometime we get too many students, often they different proficiency level, sometimes both problems arise in the same class. This was my situation.

Learning a language cannot be divorced from culture learning. Yet, in a foreign language-teaching situation, this can be quite difficult, since culture includes aspects such as “ how (native speakers) hold their bodies, how far they stand apart, where they look when they talk, how men shake their hands with each other, how children talk to their parents, and so on”. In addition, culture involves issues such as how anxiety or excitement are expressed, or how culturally accepted intonation is used to deliver humor or anger. These aspects of language are very subtle for learners to grasp, let alone learn to use. Moreover, they are not commonly addressed in regular conversation courses.

Drama is a way of bringing the issues above naturally into the language classroom. It also allows for making linguistic and cultural analyses of characters where participants use English in meaningful contexts. As learners rehearse, they engage in a process that includes the establishment of characters’ personalities, motivates and persona, creating a genuine purpose for communication. In other words, drama provides a reason to use language. Finally, it brings motivation and fun to the classroom. No matter how threatened students feel with the prospect of presenting a play, everyone will enjoy acting, since we all wish for glory and fame. Being an actor, even through a classroom performance, has a difficult to resist seductive power that the less proficient students accept as a challenge.

Writers such as Maley and Duff, (1978) and Wessels, (1987) have pointed to the values and uses of drama:

Drama can help the teacher to achieve ‘reality’ in several ways. It can overcome the students’ resistance to learning the new language:

And drama can create in students a need to learn the language:

Drama provides cultural and language enrichment by revealing insights into the target culture and presenting language contexts that make items memorable by placing them in a realistic social and physical contexts.

By allowing reading and the adding of some characterization to a drama, learners became personally and fully involved in the learning process, in a context in which it is possible for learners to feel less self-conscious and more empowered to express themselves through the multiple voices of differing characters.

Language comes alive through drama in an oral skills development class. Speaking is not only about words and structure and pronunciation, but feelings, motivations and meanings. In other words, language brings along culture. Drama in a conversation classroom makes room for those issues emerge.