Introduction to drama

 Drama is a fictional or non-fictional play written with the purpose of being performed in front of an audience, usually represented in a theatre. This fictional representational has dialogues, characters, settings, time, and audience.

Teaching English through Drama

Drama is an effective learning tool because it involves the student intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally. This activity for teaching is meaningful since it put language in context, so students are able to control their linguistic skills. Drama is used to develop students' speaking skills through learning phrases or chunks of the language. Additionally, drama can be adapted to students' needs since it can transform a space, time, and identities, allowing students to try something new and different (Winston, 2012). 

Drama in the EFL classroom

Why use drama in the EFL classroom?

Drama improves fluency and communicative competence since it allows students to use language in context, giving learners experiences of real-life events or fictional events. It encourages students in an EFL classroom to speak even with limited language, using body movements and facial expressions. 
Drama puts the teacher in the role of supporter and guide in the learning process, while students can take more responsibility for their own learning. Furthermore, it requires students to work in a positive and supportive environment (Winston, 2012). 

                                                       Benefits of using drama in an EFL classroom.

Drama helps students:

    To build confidence and improve their concentration. 

    To develop language and communication skills.

    To express themselves in ways other than through words. 

    To develop emotional intelligence.

    To acquire new fully contextualized vocabulary and structure.

    To develop creativity and cooperation. 

     To develop their English abilities such as  speech acts (pronunciation and intonation), and discourse strategies, providing a genuine context for communication to make the target language more real.

Challenges of using drama. 

Drama activities have some disadvantages:

Students can get frustrated. 

Teachers should need more time to prepare lesson plans. 

Students' level of English can be a problem for developing Drama.

Students could depend totally on teachers.

Students could not study the whole play. 

Drama Activities

Helpful games and activities that you can use as warm-up and warp-up to improve the skills and concentration of your students.

Freeze

Time: 10-15 minutes

Development: patience

Physical activity

Procedure:

Make a circle. Two people go into the middle of the circle and begin a scene (the leader can have premade characters and situations to help inspire the actors if needed). Anyone in the circle at any time can yell “freeze,” and the two in the middle literally freeze into place. The person that yelled “freeze” then goes in and taps out one of the frozen characters and then starts the scene in the exact physical position of the tapped-out character, but changes the storyline to something different. This continues until everyone has had a turn.

Where are we?

Time: 15-20 minutes

Development: teamwork

Physical activity

Procedure:

In this activity, students will be acting out different objects that are characteristic of a certain place. Though they are miming the objects, students should also use verbal language related to the room.

The teacher uses the playing cards to make pairs or trios. Get the first pair (or trio) up on stage and give them a place card. Give them a minute to organize their ideas together.

They now have two minutes to show the rest of the students where they are by arranging the table and chairs, using the props, and having a relevant conversation in the target language. They can not directly name the place they are in, but students must act within it. When the timer goes off, ask the audience to guess, incomplete sentences, where the scene just took place. Applaud and change pairs.

Mirror Talk

Time: 15-20 minutes

Development: teamwork

Physical activity

Procedure:

In this activity, the teacher pair up students with playing cards. The teacher calls on the first pair to center stage. One student, let’s call them student A, faces the board while student B has their back to the board and can’t see what’s written.

During one minute, the teacher will point to questions on the board, which student A (who can see them) will ask aloud. As student A speaks, student B tries to say the same question as close to the same time as their partner. Then, the teacher will point to that question’s answer, which student A also reads (and student B tries to say at the same time, mimicking his or her partner). Point to questions randomly, but match the answer to the question.

Switch the students and do another minute. Call up a new pair.

Once every pair has done two minutes, begin the second round. This time, you will point to questions at random, but you will not match the answers. So, a question may be “How old are you?” while the answer will be “At ten o’clock.” This random choice will keep the students focus on trying to mimic their partner as closely as possible without anticipating.

What are you doing?

Time: 10-15 minutes

Development: tenses

Physical activity

Procedure:

Students are going to stand up in a circle. One student goes into the middle and starts miming an activity, for instance, student A is brushing his teeth. Then, the next student B comes in and asks "what are you doing", then student A in the middle replies with a new activity, for example, "I'm picking nits off my head". Next, student B has to act out that activity that student A said, while student A returns to his place. This process is repeated until all the students in the circle have participated.

ABCs activity

Time: 10-15 minutes

Development: concentration

No physical activity

Procedure:

The teacher asks the learners to stand in a circle. Then explain the rules. The teacher will choose one person to begin by saying the letter A. Then anyone can say B, another person C until someone arrives at Z. Explain that the goal is to go from A to Z without speaking over each other. If two or more people say the letter B at the same time, the class must start again at A. Each time the class re-starts the game, each person will silently make eye contact with someone in the room, approach them, introduce themselves, and take their place in the circle. Model this with one learner while you're explaining the activity. 

Name Six

Time: 10-15 minutes

Development: vocabulary

No physical activity

Procedure:

Students sit on the floor and choose one student to stand in the middle of the circle. This student closes his eyes and turns around slowly, counting to ten. Meanwhile, the circle is passing the hot potato around as fast as possible so as not to burn their hands. When the center student reaches ten, he or she calls out “stop,” opens his or her eyes, and points at the student with the hot potato. The teacher will then give a category, such as “Six words that begin with ‘p’!” If the language you’re teaching uses pictographs instead of an alphabet, you can use a reference word, like “Six colors!,” or “Six occupations!”.

The hot potato begins to pass around the circle again while the chosen student has to say six words that begin with the letter “p” before the potato comes back to him or her. If the student succeeds, there’s no change and the activity begins again. If the student does not succeed, then they become the student in the middle who turns and counts. Repeat the sequence. The teacher can adjust the number of words to be said, or the number of times the hot potato is passed, according to the number of students in the class and their level to give a fair amount of time for producing the words.

Bibliography

Arroway, R. (2021). All Jazzed Up: 6 Fun Drama Activities for Dynamic Language Learning. Retrieved 26 July 2021, from https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator/drama-activities-for-language-learning/

Luh, A. (2019). Journal of English Teaching. Using Drama in EFL CLassroom, 5(2). Retrieved from  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7168/dd090979aba1593acbfb213b7126e7472724.pdf

Merritt, D. (2018). Three low-preparation drama activities for the English language classroom. Retrieved
27 July 2021, from https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/low-preparation-improvisational-theatre-english-language-classroom

Multilingual drama teaching activities | Creative Multilingualism. (2021). Retrieved 27 July 2021, from https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/resources/multilingual-drama-teaching-activities

Winston, J. (2012). Second language learning through Drama: Practical techniques and applications. Retrieved from https://books.google.com.ec/books?id=KkgvenlNhQ4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false