Drama development

I am very much aware of the limitations for dramatic development there are in a project of the nature that I carried out. From the point of view of developing a thoroughly deep understanding on the level of drama, I felt very constrained by the linguistic material I had to cover from the coursebook. Cecily O'Neill mentions this problem in the context of drama within a certain curriculum area. Nevertheless, I agree with her and firmly believe that my students profited from the "the excitement and potentiality of an active, collaborative means of processing and representing their understandings."
(O'Neill 1995: 8).

Linguistic development

Judith Ackroyd edited a collection of articles in which a variety of teachers describe the evidence they have found that drama is supportive of younger children's development in literacy. With reference to Vygotsky (1978) and McMaster (1998), one of the teachers points out that "it would appear that the use of drama influences the literacy learning of pupils." (Ackroyd 2000: 56). I claim that Vygotsky's observations do not only hold true for children, but for teenagers and adults just as much. The interplay between context, social interaction and language acquisition is, in my opinion, of everlasting importance in a learner's linguistic growth, be it in their mother tongue or in a foreign language.

The student feedback is refletcted in the results illustrating the improvement in the trait of sentence fluency, where the students could display their use of linking words: more practice was desired. In the drama class, the students made an overall improvement between 2 and 4 points between the first text they wrote and the third one asking for linkers (letter to Selma: If I inherited some of your money and test task: Speculation about a possible inheritance from Selma). Between the first and the third text (letter to Selma and its rewritten version), there was an improvement of only 3-4 points in using linkers in the drama class. This could result from the fact that the students were generally more focused on content rather than form.

In the non-drama-class, the students made an improvement between 1 and 5 points between the first and the third text ('What would I do ...?' and the test about unit 8: speculation about a possible win in the lottery. Between the first and the second text ('What would I do with two million pounds?' and its second draft that had to contain linkers), however, they made an improvement between 3 and 7 points. This shows that when the students' attention is clearly focused on a specific task, they will fulfil it well. In order to integrate the desired structure in their spontaneous writing requires more practice.

On the level of spoken language, there were plenty of opportunities when the students could learn and reinforce vocabulary in context. A very vivid illustration is the entry in the teacher's diary for January 15. Her impression was supported by the comment of one of the students on the feedback form, namely that she felt in the drama project, there had been more chances to use and reinforce the vocabulary than in the 'normal' lessons.

Future perspective

In the future, I see a great chance in promoting students' linguistic competence in writing and speaking in optional courses. A more freely chosen stimulus and less restricted development of the drama work will be more challenging for the teacher to provide the appropriate linguistic material in the foreign language. From the point of view of the reflective process within the drama, however, and students' chances to actively contribute towards the process of the work, more freedom in the choice of topics to deal with is necessary. It would also be interesting to see how students' skills in creative writing in a completely fictional context could develop through drama: in the areas of story-writing, poetry or designing their own scripts.