AN INTRODUCTION TO DRAMA

Boulton (1968) stated that drama is “not really a piece of literature for reading. It is the literature that walks and talks before our eyes’. On the other hand, Via (1987) defined drama as "communication between people" that conveys meaning. To have a clear idea about what is drama and its elements let's watch the next video 👇

DRAMA IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

The English as a Foreign Language classroom is a melting pot of teachings methods and techniques. The beauty of the EFL classroom is that teacher has the freedom to try out whatever creative idea. Drama is one subject which can be useful for teaching English language as a second language.

Why use drama? Drama techniques encourage the use of the entire body and motivate learners to “think” with their bodies, not only with their minds. It allows learners to be creative in a totally different way. It can build confidence in shy learners. Finally, it promotes the fact that language is not only about words but also about body language.

Since drama is essentially an act of communicating meaning, students are actively engaged while learning through drama. They take part in conversations or practices that require them to use their imagination and foreign language in contextualized situations. When such activity is planned well enough, students will also find it interesting. Such motivating learning activity will surely encourage and help them develop their language skills and to acquire the language more deeply and naturally.

DRAMA ACTIVITIES

MIMING WORDS

Connsolidate meaning and revise vocabulary. All the students and the teacher stand in a circle. The teacher has prepared vocabulary cards with the target language which are in a box in the middle of the circle. The teacher takes a card from the box and returns to her spot in the circle. She reads the word aloud. Then she acts out the meaning of the word. The student on her left must do the same action. The next student on the left must repeat. This continues until all the students have done the teacher’s action for the word. This should be done quite quickly to maintain interest. When the action has gone around the circle, another students chooses a vocabulary card from the box and the activity starts again.

MIMING SENTENCES

Prepare cards beforehand with common sentences or questions. This can be related to a specific scenario, such as making small talk (How do you know Jacky?), travelling (Can you tell me where the bus station is?), or introductions (This is my colleague, John). One student takes a card and must act it out and the other students must guess what it is.

MIMING SCENARIOS

Show your students a video clip of a scenario – two friends chatting in a coffee shop, a husband and wife arguing, a couple of friends laughing together. In pairs they must each choose a participant. They must study that person in the clip – their hand gestures, body language, facial expressions. Once they have watched the clip a few times, the teacher plays just the audio of the clip and the students must mime out their characters while the audio is playing.

CHANGING BODY GAME

You may not at first see this as a drama game–but it is! (Pretending you are something/someone else using art!). First, take a picture of each child and glue it to a piece of paper. Have children to go through magazines, newspapers, etc…Have them cut out pictures of animals, people, and characters. Then, they then cut off the heads of all of these pictures; they can place them over their picture to see what they would look like in someone else’s body! Example: Cut the head off of Bozo the clown and place the rest of the body under the head of your picture — and you can see what it looks like!

READ AN EASY STORY THAT CAN BE DRAMATIZED

Choose children to participate and have them recreate the story. They can make up the lines or you can reread or tell it as they act it out.

A variation is to divide the students into small groups. Have each group pick a story and provide time for them to read it, choose parts and practice acting it out. Then have each group perform their story for the rest of the class and/or for children in younger grades.