SPICE UP YOUR ENGLISH CLASS WITH LITERARY TEXTS: DRAMA

Drama

Focused skills: Speaking

Key objectives

· How can I use drama in the English class?
· How can I make original dramatic pieces accessible and enjoyable for students?
· What formats should I use to introduce drama?
· How can drama be utilised as a speaking exercise?
· What resources are available?

Basic ideas for using drama in the classroom

· Act out the dialogue: Get students to read and act out a dialogue in pairs.

· Perform reader’s theatre: Select a short play or excerpt and get students to choose different characters. At this stage they can simply read out the lines but encourage them to do so dramatically.

· Act out the scene or the story: This could be done with a short story or a scene from a play. Get students to choose roles and act out the drama. You could let them improvise with language. Focus on getting the message across.

· Write the dialogue for a scene: Try using a YouTube clip from a film and play it without the dialogue. The students then have to write the dialogue for the scene.

More advanced ideas for drama in the classroom

· Acting out or putting words to an emotion: Get students to dramatise ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘happiness’.

· Giving voice to inanimate objects: You can do this using classroom objects such as a stapler, or a piece of fruit, like an apple. Students can write a monologue for the object. It could be done to teach what a monologue is – Hamlet’s soliloquay for example.

· Create a character and write a monologue for the character: This could be done using online resources such as Tellagami.

· Mime: Get a group of students to mime a scene. Then the other groups have to put together the dialogue for the scene.

· Improvisation: Put students in small groups and hand out character cards and situations. Set a time limit of 3-5 mins for students to improvise a scene with their characters and situation.

Using drama: Bringing the text to life

A text doesn’t have to be dramatic in order to bring it to life through drama.

English books are full of dialogues and stories that can manipulated into short, dramatic pieces, which can be voice or avatar recorded, or simply acted out.

Inanimate objects can help students overcome any fears they may have about acting out spoken English.

Making drama accessible

Using materials and formats that will engage students. For example, getting your students to make a radio ad as an introduction to a unit.

Writing and recording dialogue for a YouTube video.

Reader’s Theatre: Stories, plays and folktales adapted for small performances.http ://www.aaronshep.com/rt/RTE.html

2.0 Tools: YouTube, Ads, Avatars, Podcasts

Workshop

Let's use ‘The Pig’, a poem by Roald Dahl

We’re going to work in 4 groups to try out different approaches to creating a dramatic piece.

Each group will take one of the following ideas:

• Radio Advertisement

• Interview with the farmer

• Interview with the pig

• Interview with the farmer’s family (post-consumption!)

Let’s bring this poem to life using our imagination and some useful tools such as:

• Inanimate objects

• Mobile phones to record audio or video

• Tellagami to use avatars

• Toontastic to create a cartoon based drama with live audio

Resources

1. BBC Seven Ages of Man

Advertisement created by the BBC to promete its series.
Actor Benedict Cumberbach recites All the world's a stage,by William Shakespeare, from the play As You Like It.

2. Reader’s Theatre:

http ://www.aaronshep.com/rt/RTE.html

Reader’s Theater Editions are free scripts for reader’s theater (or readers theatre) adapted from stories written by Aaron Shepard and others—mostly humor, fantasy, and world tales from a variety of cultures. A full range of reading levels is included, with scripts aimed mostly at ages 8–15.

3. YouTube: Create a You Tube account to save the students' plays.