Bringing dramatization back

Dramatization is putting the creative back in the classroom by placing verbal and non-verbal communication at the core of language learning. Dramatization encourages the student to infer meaning by both engaging with the language and interacting through action, giving a new life breath to the language classroom. By all manner of means, dramatization embraces a child’s imagination and invites them to release their feelings and emotions.

Every theatre play is unique and brings children to different scenarios while impersonating characters from disparate worlds and realities. Therefore, dramatization is a phenomenal pretext to develop verbal and non-verbal communication and a fundamental tool to develop language in ELL classrooms. As Peregoy and Boyle (2008) state “drama activities provide students with a variety of contextualized and scaffold activities that gradually involve more participation and more oral language proficiency, they are also nonthreatening and have a lot of fun”.

Drama is obviously ENTERTAINING! If not, what’s the point of doing theatre plays? Learning is fun and we should always enjoy our teaching to encourage students and make them enjoy the learning process.

If we are able to produce entertaining drama lessons where learners feel comfortable speaking the target language we should be content with the activity. If, in addition, learners build confidence in their ability to speak the language and develop social skills, you are doing a S+ work.

In relation to these skills, cooperation is essential in drama and students must feel accepted by others while being thrilled to play their role, involving the whole person as a total physical activity.

The characters that appear in a play give us the perfect range with which to play and perhaps, give a leading character to an unconfident child, or otherwise, relegate the more talkative ones to secondary roles.

Regardless of the role you want your students to interpret, it is important that children learn to be tolerable. Living first-hand unfavourable or unfair experiences such as the misunderstood, laughing stock or the innocent accused makes them realize about the painful realities that surround them, expanding their perspective and raising social awareness of problems that were, so far, unthinkable for them.

Although some representation may seem far from our realities, dramatizations are nothing more than a representation of our lives. The idea of representing other characters, with their own ideas and feelings, shapes the individual, preparing them to face their own problems in a natural way.

That's me during a drama activity that we did in class!

In another ocassion I will talk about the multiple ways of introducing drama in a classroom. Stay tunned!