Archives


 Vol.9 

Teaching Drama in Creative Ways


Author
Jui-Yuan Li
Synopsis

Using drama in foreign language classroom is considered efficient to motivate students to practice the target langauge thus enable them to learn better in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Moverever, a drama is accomplised in a teamwork from students under the teacher's guidance and supervision. Feedback from student members and the teacher provides stimuli to trigger students cogntivie competence to respond and produce their own langauge for the purpose of communication. This teaching project employs the techniques of text and discourse analysis to enahnce students' reading strategies to comprehend the script and drama text spoken by different roles. After comprehension, students rewrite the text in their own sentences regarding their knowledge on lexicon, syntax, and semantics. They will act the play on stage after systematically practicing on pronunciation, intonation, and rhythem. Altogether the stage acting entails diversity, integration and interaction in terms of teaching and learing behaviors. The perfomance thus provides students opportunities to independentaly think and solve various problems on their own. It helps build up their confidnece when they are using the target langauge in their everyday life later on. These activities fulfill the requirements of creativiety which distinguishes one from mediocrity. Creativity is not about routines which can be done through technical aspects. However, creativity concerns not only intelligence and cultural taste, but also interest, fun, and practical needs. Most important of all, creativity is one's own work, not copy or immitation from others. Likewise, creativity matters inspiration and attitude, not mechanical drilling or mimicing. Fortunately, students' innate ability can be brought about if they are guided properly by the teacher, who is a faciliator, not a trainer, throughout the entire project. The stage performance prepared by this teaching syllabus inclues five components: brainstorming and improvision, roles and role acting, virtulization and imagination, immersion, plots and stage properties. This paper explains how the teacher incorporates these five components in her teaching plan to invovle students' mental work to act on stage. They perform so naturally and confidentaly that speaking is not to memorize the artist's language, but the students' own spoken language through imagination, passion, verbal and non-verbal presentation in public so as to in theater. A hybrid of such various components in students' stage peformance focuses on student's versality and their own experiences. This is why no other TL activities than this innovative syllabus can so efficiently encourage students-their motivation and their potential.