Drama Project - Learning From Direct Experience
by Joanna Fedorowicz, SSP nr4 & SG nr7 Kraków,
Sylwia Wodzińska, NKJO Włoclawek

"All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players" (W. Shakespeare, As You Like It)

When we observe our pupils during their everyday activities such as, for example, talking to their friends, playing games or working at school, it is noticeable that they possess a natural ability to take roles - they very often imitate the sounds they have heard, they impersonate their favourite characters, and what is more they do it without any fear of being observed or judged as would be the case with teenagers. If so, why don't we, teachers, use these innate abilities in our classrooms? This could be one of the best ways for our pupils to learn a foreign language, using innate abilities developed from their personal experience.

The main aims of this paper are:

• to present the idea of using a drama project with young learners leading to the full - scale staging of a play in the target language
• to show the teachers concerned the development of the necessary stages of a drama project, based on a fairy-tale, in this case Little Red Riding Hood
• to present a few examples of activities that could be used at different stages of the project

The long-term goal that ends with the full staging of the play in the target language. The main advantages of the project work are connected with the development of the children's positive attitude towards the learning process. It gives them a lot of pleasure and satisfaction as it contains the features of real work in the theatre. Students have to get to know the characters they are to impersonate, learn their lines by heart and constantly rehearse the roles - these are the factors that make them believe that they are doing something totally different from what they are usually engaged in during their classes. Moreover, they can derive a lot of pleasure from their experience as "little actors". Practically all young learners are still uninhibited and this is a characteristic of young learners which teachers should take advantage of when working on a drama project.

It is worth mentioning here, however, that a drama project is not always pure pleasure, it is definitely hard work for both the students and the teacher. The aim of a drama project is mainly the fostering of the development of the student's communicative competence. Nevertheless, for some students it will be the proof that they are able to achieve some competence in English and to participate in the project with other, sometimes more advanced students. For all the students a drama project will certainly mean developing their natural abilities to take roles and have fun with their work.

We believe that the most important benefit of drama project work is not only the learning through experience but also the opportunity for a pleasant, interesting and challenging way of practising vocabulary and structures in a meaningful context.

The stages of drama project with young learners

1. The first stage is the choosing of the text - a play or a fairytale. The whole success of the project depends on the appropriate decision. While selecting the text teachers should take into consideration the following factors: the plot should be fairly simple, familiar and interesting to the students. There should be as many dialogues as possible (monologues should be avoided in order not to overburden individual students with too many lines to remember). Texts written for native speakers could be suitable after some simplification of the language.

The teacher's role at this stage is to present the story in the most interesting way in order to evoke students' involvement and motivation.

• One of the ways to achieve this goal is to present the characters by means of pictures (it is more effective with the texts students are familiar with - like famous fairytales). Pictures can be shown to the students with the characters' names being elicited first in the students' mother tongue. They can be briefly discussed and then their names in the target language should be introduced. In the case of Little Red Riding Hood the students' interest will probably focus on the name of the main character as it is a lot different from its Polish equivalent.

2. Assigning roles

At this point students should be quite familiar with the characters in the play, and they should have already chosen who they want to be. If not we can help them to get to know more about the main characters practising and exploring with them the use of the most common adjectives.

• First the features of character are discussed in the students' mother tongue. Then the teacher can present the different adjectives corresponding to the personalities of the characters in the target language (e.g. happy, old, angry, etc.). The students' task is to match the adjectives to the pictures of the characters: Wolf, Huntsman etc. This activity helps the students to learn more about the characters they are to impersonate and to choose the one they want to be. It also involves the practise of the language - in this case, adjectives. There is no correct answer so the students can play with the language.

At the stage of assigning roles it is advisable to remember the prompter whose contribution to the play is very significant. If there are more children willing to participate in the project than there are characters in the play, it is worth dividing the class into two groups working on the same story simultaneously. It is important, however, to remember that only the volunteer students should be involved in the staging of the play. The rest of the learners may be occupied with the roles of, for example, directors, advisors, decoration-operators, etc.

3. Reading out the dialogues and rehearsals

The next step is mastering the dialogues - the aim of this stage is to work on the students' pronunciation, to help them to understand the text and learn it by heart. It is impossible to start rehearsals before the students know the text well. Reading out the dialogues is followed by a long period of rehearsals, which is a very demanding part of the project work. During this stage it is very difficult to keep the students' attention and interest at the same level. At first they find rehearsals challenging, interesting and motivating, but as time passes they can become boring and too demanding. To avoid such a situation, students should be provided with constant stimuli to make them active, for instance, warm-up activities to keep them on task and maintaining a development of their language skills. Here we present these, which are aimed at practising adjectives and at the same time helping the students to improve their drama skills.

• "Do it in an angry way" - students are asked to mime a particular imagined activity (e.g. walking through a forest, smiling, picking up mushrooms, knocking at the door, etc.) in a certain manner, this task requires from the students the use of their imagination, the aim of this activity is not only to practise the adjectives but also to prepare them for acting out their roles.
• "An interview" - this activity has two stages, first the students are given their "identity cards" and they have to behave as if they were the characters described on the IDs (e.g. grandma, 65 years old, likes cooking, etc.), at the same time they are to observe their friends. The next step is an interview - one or more students are interviewed - the others ask different questions in order to guess who the person is (according to the ID); the learners practise asking questions and they also develop their observation skills.
• "Chinese whispers" - this activity is more like a game; the students play in two groups, each group stands in a row, with one person standing aside (this person is to guess the word); the last person in a row is given a slip of paper with an expression including the adjective and the character's name (e.g. happy Wolf, angry Grandma, hungry Huntsman, etc.), reads it and whispers the word to the next person's ear; the first person in the row is to mime what he/she has just heard - the task of the person standing aside is to guess the expression.
• "Acting out situations from the story" - there are two groups, each of them prepares a few slips of paper with some situations that may happen in the story written down, one person from each group has to choose one slip of paper with the situation prepared by the other group, and his/her task is to present it (by means of miming) to his/her own group so that they could guess it, the group scores one point for the right guess and one more if the situation guessed is described in correct English.
• Miming characters - the teacher reads the name of one of the characters in the tale or elsewhere (from another known tale or from everyday life), and students present it by miming the features of the character - this activity involves a lot of imagination, it depends on the student how he/she presents the characters. There are as many good solutions as there are students.

4. Working on decorations, costumes, invitations and posters

This stage of the drama project might involve other subjects like, for example, art (preparing decorations, costumes and posters) or computer studies (writing invitations). Such co-operation exposes the pupils to cross-curricular work and is also valuable as a way to save time (so often limited in the English lessons). The final rehearsal, however, should be done with the involvement of costumes and decorations and a few chosen as an audience to contextualise the event. As for the invitations, they are a nice element both for the learners - they can feel the importance of the event, and for the parents and other fellow learners, to whom receiving an invitation to the play might take as a compliment.

5. Full-staging of the play

Usually this is done in the afternoon to give the opportunity to the parents to see it.

Conclusion

To sum up, we would like to point out again some benefits of drama project work introduced to young learners' English classes. These are:

• co-operation with peer group
• practise of language in a meaningful, realistic context
• an opportunity to express emotion
• an opportunity to make learning an enjoyable experience
• a sense of achievement
• involvement of action and body language
• confidence and self-esteem in learning English
• development of imagination

All these contribute to the improvement and growth of a child as a young learner of English. Moreover, project work with young learners contributes also to the development of a teacher - he/she has to plan the project work very conscientiously, but sometimes stand aside to let the learners take some responsibility for what they are doing.

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