“Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! Ahoy, Me Hearties! All Hands on Deck!” says the teacher with a black eye-patch, a feathered hat and a parrot on her left shoulder.
“Aye, Aye Captain!” answer the students getting their books ready while the teacher enters the class for an hour long reading of Treasure Island.
Drama: an integral part of our curriculum
Integrating drama in our classes allows our students to make choices, express emotions, and form connections with their schoolwork. Drama can foster language skills such as reading, writing, speaking and listening by creating a suitable context. Drama is a powerful language teaching tool that involves all of the students interactively during the lesson.
Early on in the school year, our Senior A, B, C and D students are encouraged to role play every suitable text in their course books. With the help of their teachers, our students talk about the characters, try to imagine their feelings and are guided towards proper intonation to express these feelings. The lesson becomes more interesting, more engaging and it leads to easier acquisition of new vocabulary and grammar.
Later on, around November, students are split in groups and each group, in turn, is given the chance to present a sketch, which they themselves have produced, to the class. To facilitate this many, if not all, of our classrooms have been modified to become experiential learning environments with different settings such as a café, a surgery, a grocer’s, a chemist’s and even a planetarium. The four key areas of drama skills: devising, directing, acting, and critiquing are thus introduced to the students.
Still later on, in January, English literature, in the form of graded readers by Oxford University Press, is introduced into their weekly lessons. Classical books such as Frankenstein, the Phantom of the Opera, The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Thirty Nine Steps, Treasure Island, A Christmas Carol and others are read, discussed and role played in class. By March, most of our students not only enjoy the weekly sessions but have gained many benefits which include increase of confidence, awareness of word meaning, acquisition of proper intonation, development of fluency and even more importantly have gained a deeper understanding of their own emotions and learn effective expression. As a result, their confidence soars.
The culmination of all the above is the end of year production of modified – with the help of our students – plays to be performed by our young actors and actresses in front of an audience of hundreds of spectators. It is astonishing to watch their transformation from students trying to learn their lines by heart to little actors embodying their role, modifying the lines – because they feel more natural – helping others blend in and enjoying themselves immensely. You know they have stopped learning a foreign language and have embarked on a lifelong journey of mastering a second native language.
“Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! Ahoy, Me Sea Dogs! Weigh Anchor!” says the teacher as the lesson comes to an end.
“Yo-Ho-Ho Captain! We’ll have her shipshape!” say the students promising to be fully prepared for next week’s session.
