Electronic Village Online 2010: TESOL Drama Six Week Workshop

Bringing Language Alive through Process Drama

Process drama is a powerful language-learning tool because it involves all of the learners interactively all of the class time. Used for decades as a framework for reading, writing, and social studies classes in mainstream UK, Australian, and Canadian classrooms, process drama is now being utilized in second language classrooms worldwide because it provides stimuli for ongoing speaking, listening, reading, writing, and critical thinking opportunities while working within a dramatic context that evokes the use of intuition, imagination, and feeling. But what is it exactly? And how do we implement it?

In this six-week online workshop, we will examine what it is, how it works, and how to apply it in relation to language acquisition in a step-by-step manner.

Target Audience: All ESOL teachers

Sponsors: SPL-IS and the TESOL-Drama Forum

Week One: Introduction

Introduction of moderators and participants. An examination of readings related to process drama; getting to know what process drama is.

Week Two: The Tools of Process Drama

Selecting theme or learning area, context or particular circumstances, roles for teacher and students, frames within which the action will occur, the signs such as artifacts, images, sounds, or personal items to bring the drama to life, and strategies – improvisation, writing in role, mime, still images or tableaux, out of role discussion, discussion in role, ritual, dance, slow motion, inner monologue, thought tracking, etc.

Week Three: Utilizing the Tools, Constructing a Drama

Participants will:

1. Establish an area of learning,
2. Determine the context or particular circumstances and
3. The roles for the participants and teacher
4. The frame for action
5. Establish a pre-text

Week Four: Processing the Drama

Participants will engage in whole group activity to suggest possible pre-texts (such as poems, comic stories, picture stories, etc.) as the basis for the process drama. Participants will develop their strategies around the selected pre-texts. Their suggested strategies will then support the movement of the drama stemming from the pre-text. Once a strategy is suggested, it will be demonstrated by moderators and the other participants in such a way that it not only deepens the drama but explores the mechanism of the strategy in several ways, at the same time, moving the drama on. We will be building the drama while discussing and implementing the process.


Week Five: Suggestions and Implementation of Strategies and Techniques

Participants will use some techniques that can be applied to the process of the drama such as: voice over, narration, summing up, reporting, tapping in, voice collage, speaking diaries, imaging, and teacher in role questioning as we bring the drama to final climax and denouement.

Week Six: Reflection on the Uses of Process Drama in the Language Classroom: Possibilities and Challenges

The first part of the week will be used to reflect upon the process undertaken and to attempt to identify areas of possible use in relation to language learning. The second part of the week will be used to identify direction for the TESOL/EVO – Drama workshop of 2011.

Communication Media

E-discussion, Yahoo or Google chat, SKYPE or other CONFERENCE, links to be determined.

Moderator’s Biographical Statement

Shin-Mei Kao: kaoshinmei@gmail.com

Shin-Mei Kao is an associate professor of English in the Department
of Foreign Languages & Literature at National Cheng Kung University,
Taiwan, R.O.C. She is interested in how teachers and students
interact in EFL settings when different innovative approaches are
used. She has worked with all levels of Taiwanese EFL learners and
is co-author with Cecily O’Neill of “Words into Worlds: Learning
a Second Language through Process Drama”.