Professional Development Reflections
"Teaching Foreign Language Through Drama" Annette Cortés, Center for Puppetry Arts, Atlanta, GA
This workshop was led by Annette Cortés, the Education Director of the Society of the Educational Arts (www.sea-online.info), a bilingual art/education initiative in New York City. Annette led attendees in participating in several drama-oriented activities that can be used in a bilingual or ESL classroom.
The first activity was an ice-breaker, in which we had to introduce ourselves by first name, and invent a last name describing how we were feeling, e.g., Joyce Interested. This would be a good game for practicing emotion adjectives; other variations could be used to elicit just about any kind of vocabulary: what students had for lunch, what they’re doing over the weekend, etc. This was a flexible activity that could be used for adults or children.
The second and third activities weren’t particularly drama-oriented, but were TPR activities that could also be adapted for adults or children. For “Cross the Room,” the group was divided in half, with the two half groups facing each other. Annette told us to cross to the other group if we met certain conditions: if we were wearing a certain color, if we spoke a certain language, etc. Again, very flexible; this could easily be adapted to whatever vocabulary is being studied, and if students respond well to it, could also be re-used with many different lessons. After a certain number of rounds, it would also be a good idea to have different students assume the leader role, and make up their own conditions. What I especially liked about this game was that it was non-competitive—the side with the most people at the end did not win.
“Change 3 Things” was an observation game. We each had a partner, and had a moment or two to examine our partners. Then partner A turned around, while partner B changed three things about their appearance. Partner A had to state what those three things were. This would be a great activity for teaching clothing and personal description words. While I don’t think adults would feel “talked-down-to” in participating in a game like this, I can see that it would be most effective for children, who take a delight in tricking each other, and would deliberately try to change the most subtle things, in order to try and fool their partners.
The next activity started to lean towards improv drama. Again in pairs, we were assigned complementary roles, e.g, child and parent, teacher and students, etc. One partner started a conversation with a sentence beginning with the letter A; the challenge was for each partner to alternate keeping the conversation going while continuing through the alphabet. This is an activity I would only try with intermediate language learners, as beginners might lack the vocabulary for so much originally generated language, and could be easily frustrated.
The next activity put us in a circle, with Annette in the middle. Before starting the game, she explained a set of 3-person configurations that made up a representation of an animal; for example, the middle person became the trunk of an elephant, while the people on either side became the ears. After a few practice rounds, Annette then proceeded to point at someone in the circle, call out an animal, and count to the three. The person indicated was the middle of the animal (the elephant’s trunk, for example, or the horse’s nose), and the people on either side had to quickly form up the ears or lion’s mane, etc., before the count of three. The joke of the game was that if the leader called “donkey,” no movement at all was required, and as with Simon Says, moving when no movement was called for disqualified you from the game.
This game was clearly intended for children, and I couldn’t really see any way to adapt it to adults; even those of us taking the workshop felt a bit silly, and the race to remember and form the animal before the count of three made me feel downright uncomfortable. Some very sensitive children are likely to feel threatened by even such a low level of competition, not to mention the stigma of being “out” of the game for moving on the call of “donkey.” Further, in terms of classroom management, what are the “out” kids supposed to be doing while everyone else is still playing?
The last two activities were approaching true drama workshop material. For “Image Theater,” we were split into work groups, and each group received a photograph with as many people in the picture as in the group. We were to decide what we thought was going on in the picture, then create a “frozen image,” or tableau, recreating the picture. In the second part of the activity, we had to present our tableaux to the rest of the class. Annette put her hand on the shoulder of one person in the tableau, allowing that person to unfreeze and say a line as the character in their photograph. Audience members were instructed to guess what was going on in the scene.
If I were using this activity in a classroom, in order to reduce anxiety, I would definitely explain the need to have a character line ready ahead of time; beginning language learners especially will have a hard time coming up with enough spontaneous vocabulary to fulfill that requirement. It was also tricky to see, even after revealing the photographs, what each group was trying to portray, so it would be necessary to assemble the pictures carefully, so as to have very distinctive poses and expressions. It might also be a good idea to provide a limited number of props.
The last activity was the most complex. The first part required each person in a group of 3 to write down our names and two words we felt described us. The resulting 9 words became the “script” of a 9-word “play,” in which the following rules had to be observed: each “actor” must speak at least twice, there must be 5 seconds of just movement with no sound, another 5 seconds of stillness (no movement), but sound permitted, and finally, each play must have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
This was, frankly, ridiculous. It came off as the most absurd kind of performance art, and although Annette somehow got the 25 or so people at the workshop to participate, I cannot in any way see convincing adult ESL students, some of whom have a very serious and urgent need to learn English, to take such an activity seriously.
So of the seven activities presented, at least 4 and possibly 5 of them could be adapted for an adult classroom. Most of them did not seem to particularly oriented towards either drama or foreign language teaching, but this is not necessarily a flaw—many children’s games can be creatively used for language teaching purposes.
The first activity was an ice-breaker, in which we had to introduce ourselves by first name, and invent a last name describing how we were feeling, e.g., Joyce Interested. This would be a good game for practicing emotion adjectives; other variations could be used to elicit just about any kind of vocabulary: what students had for lunch, what they’re doing over the weekend, etc. This was a flexible activity that could be used for adults or children.
The second and third activities weren’t particularly drama-oriented, but were TPR activities that could also be adapted for adults or children. For “Cross the Room,” the group was divided in half, with the two half groups facing each other. Annette told us to cross to the other group if we met certain conditions: if we were wearing a certain color, if we spoke a certain language, etc. Again, very flexible; this could easily be adapted to whatever vocabulary is being studied, and if students respond well to it, could also be re-used with many different lessons. After a certain number of rounds, it would also be a good idea to have different students assume the leader role, and make up their own conditions. What I especially liked about this game was that it was non-competitive—the side with the most people at the end did not win.
“Change 3 Things” was an observation game. We each had a partner, and had a moment or two to examine our partners. Then partner A turned around, while partner B changed three things about their appearance. Partner A had to state what those three things were. This would be a great activity for teaching clothing and personal description words. While I don’t think adults would feel “talked-down-to” in participating in a game like this, I can see that it would be most effective for children, who take a delight in tricking each other, and would deliberately try to change the most subtle things, in order to try and fool their partners.
The next activity started to lean towards improv drama. Again in pairs, we were assigned complementary roles, e.g, child and parent, teacher and students, etc. One partner started a conversation with a sentence beginning with the letter A; the challenge was for each partner to alternate keeping the conversation going while continuing through the alphabet. This is an activity I would only try with intermediate language learners, as beginners might lack the vocabulary for so much originally generated language, and could be easily frustrated.
The next activity put us in a circle, with Annette in the middle. Before starting the game, she explained a set of 3-person configurations that made up a representation of an animal; for example, the middle person became the trunk of an elephant, while the people on either side became the ears. After a few practice rounds, Annette then proceeded to point at someone in the circle, call out an animal, and count to the three. The person indicated was the middle of the animal (the elephant’s trunk, for example, or the horse’s nose), and the people on either side had to quickly form up the ears or lion’s mane, etc., before the count of three. The joke of the game was that if the leader called “donkey,” no movement at all was required, and as with Simon Says, moving when no movement was called for disqualified you from the game.
This game was clearly intended for children, and I couldn’t really see any way to adapt it to adults; even those of us taking the workshop felt a bit silly, and the race to remember and form the animal before the count of three made me feel downright uncomfortable. Some very sensitive children are likely to feel threatened by even such a low level of competition, not to mention the stigma of being “out” of the game for moving on the call of “donkey.” Further, in terms of classroom management, what are the “out” kids supposed to be doing while everyone else is still playing?
The last two activities were approaching true drama workshop material. For “Image Theater,” we were split into work groups, and each group received a photograph with as many people in the picture as in the group. We were to decide what we thought was going on in the picture, then create a “frozen image,” or tableau, recreating the picture. In the second part of the activity, we had to present our tableaux to the rest of the class. Annette put her hand on the shoulder of one person in the tableau, allowing that person to unfreeze and say a line as the character in their photograph. Audience members were instructed to guess what was going on in the scene.
If I were using this activity in a classroom, in order to reduce anxiety, I would definitely explain the need to have a character line ready ahead of time; beginning language learners especially will have a hard time coming up with enough spontaneous vocabulary to fulfill that requirement. It was also tricky to see, even after revealing the photographs, what each group was trying to portray, so it would be necessary to assemble the pictures carefully, so as to have very distinctive poses and expressions. It might also be a good idea to provide a limited number of props.
The last activity was the most complex. The first part required each person in a group of 3 to write down our names and two words we felt described us. The resulting 9 words became the “script” of a 9-word “play,” in which the following rules had to be observed: each “actor” must speak at least twice, there must be 5 seconds of just movement with no sound, another 5 seconds of stillness (no movement), but sound permitted, and finally, each play must have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
This was, frankly, ridiculous. It came off as the most absurd kind of performance art, and although Annette somehow got the 25 or so people at the workshop to participate, I cannot in any way see convincing adult ESL students, some of whom have a very serious and urgent need to learn English, to take such an activity seriously.
So of the seven activities presented, at least 4 and possibly 5 of them could be adapted for an adult classroom. Most of them did not seem to particularly oriented towards either drama or foreign language teaching, but this is not necessarily a flaw—many children’s games can be creatively used for language teaching purposes.