Experimenting with drama in EFL

The Friday Show has been a usual fixture at the summer camp. For this week, my group of students (9- to 11-year-olds) came up with a short sketch.

Since it was my first time using drama in the 'classroom', I decided to let things develop without a fixed plan.

 

Day 1, Monday

The students worked in two smaller groups. One group came up with the plot while the other group chose a song and transcribed its lyrics.

As most of them were at level A1/A2, they talked in L1 but produced written language in English.

Day 2, Tuesday

Having taken note of what the students came up on Day 1, I prepared a worksheet for the group by typing their original plot on Word.

For the day's main task, I had identified six 'scenes', for which short dialogues would need creating, in the plot. The students were therefore split into six pairs. Each pair had to write short dialogues for their designated scene.

Again, they discussed the finer ideas in L1 but produced written language in English. The weaker students needed support since they didn't have enough language for writing; word spelling was a key problem for them too.

Day 3, Wednesday

The students worked on the other items for the show.

(In the meantime, the script was more or less ready behind the scene - several mistakes in the student-generated dialogues were ironed out. I also added a small number of simple structures at level A1/A2 to it.)

Day 4, Thursday

The students rehearsed the sketch and improved on a few places in the script. Support on pronunciation was given to one or two weaker students.

Day 5, Friday

The students had a final rehearsal on their own.

About half of the group were already able to memorise their parts, which was an excellent sign in terms of learning and using the language. This was, however, not compulsory as they were told they could always rely on the script. Having said that, only one student read directly from her piece of paper due to pronunciation-related challenges.

The final result was satisfactory given we had a few hours to create a sketch. In terms of language learning, it would have been better if error correction had been elicited from the students.

With hindsight, I shouldn't have overlooked stage choreography in the rehearsals. Apology for being the perfectionist here. For maximum performance effects, the students should be encouraged to adopt clear diction and appropriate tones, speak with audible voice levels, and pay attention to their body gestures (i.e. avoid facing the audience with their side or back).

Teaching YLs: a more refined take on student-centredness

I was teaching animals (vocabulary) with can/can't (grammar) to a group of 9- to 11-year-olds.

It started off with the idea of engaging my students at the planning stage. (Yes, it's always been my nightmare to have a group of bored faces who would zone out during the lesson!) As I was delivering the in-person lesson, I noticed a  special vibe which I had never experienced in all other previous YL classes. It was akin to the concept of 'flow' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Finding Flow (New York: Perseus, 1998) - wonderful to take a back seat and see the whole class of YLs working so calmly in pairs.

Looking back on the lesson, I've identified what particularly worked well:

Warm-up routine

I've been a language learner and there were occasions on which I wished I'd had the chance to get to know certain classmates. Hence I decided to use 'rings of circle' as both a GTKY activity in the first lesson and a warm-up routine.

The student-to-student rapport was overall excellent. We continued building on the familiar routine of standing in two rings of circle, so that everybody has the chance of talking to each other through rotation and turning towards each other.

Presentation of vocabulary

I realised that whenever I mimed along with flashcards, it was always me, the teacher, who imposed the actions on my students.

What I did this morning was that I elicited the mime of each animal from individual students. Then other students followed their classmates, which worked wonderfully.

(Thanks to my colleague, teacher S, for guiding me on drawing flashcards with a marker pen. Teacher development for next year: learn how to draw?) 

 

Practice of vocabulary and grammar: guess which animal

Team games worked well. For vocabulary, an individual student had to mime the animal while the teams compete against each other in writing the answer most quickly. (N.B. One benefit of not having gone for 'saying the answer aloud' is that it might be harder for the teacher to judge who have raised their hands most quickly.)

For grammar, a representative of each team was given the same animal. They went back to their teammates, who had to ask them 'Can you + verb?' (questions). The representative could only answer 'Yes, I can' or 'No, I can't', and their teammates needed to guess the animal as quickly as they could.

I ended up showing the answer once by accident - didn't hide it well in front of my students. They were honest enough to tell me, so each team earned a point!

 

Positive points system

The implication of catching YLs being good is that I've started giving points to the well-behaved opposite team when a student started misbehaving. (The key word is 'opposite'.)

I've also started using the points system more consistently when grabbing students' attention for giving instructions, asking students to tidy up/put things away, etc. 2 points are sometimes given to the 'good' team, whereas the 'bad' team still get 1 point if they are just a bit slower.

Teaching YLs in-person - after a hiatus

Forgive my silly thoughts, but I do sometimes wonder if I would forget how to teach YLs after a year of not having done it. This was exactly how I was feeling before my first summer camp lesson today - a group of 9- to 11-year-olds. By the way, the youngest student I've taught this year (2020-21) was 13.

Some observations:

• GTKY with two rings of students worked well. I had a group of 12, so there were two rings of 6. At any time, only the inner or outer ring would rotate.
  
  
  
  I introduced myself to the students, which also acted as a model. "My name is Daniel. What's your name?"
  
  
  
  At the very end, I asked the students to turn towards their partners in the same ring, so that everybody has a chance to talk with (absolutely) each other.
  
  
  
• Chain story to revise vocabulary doesn't work so well in a plenary setting in terms of student engagement, unless the size of the group is small. The compensation was to ask the students to help each other in an attempt to engage those who have already had their turn. This isn't a new observation, but the only time I had success with an adult class of 4 when I used the plenary setting as a model for pairwork practice.
  
  
  
• Lesson planning / Classroom management - one way of alternating between 'stirrers' and 'calmers' is to think about whether the students have been actively moving and whether they would be doing the same or opposite in a subsequent activity.
  

(At the risk of slight exaggeration, the number of hours I've spent under the sun today more or less exceeded that I did for the whole year in the UK. Anything above 15°C is warm - 20°C is hot - this is my idea of summer temperatures. It was 32°C today in Milan - lovely blue sky though.)

Teaching grammar: self-checking questions

Concept Checking Questions (CCQs) are undoubtedly a term familiar to any teacher who has completed a TEFL training course. We ask CCQs to make sure our students have fully understood a lesson's target language, so that they won't fossilise erroneous assumptions which may later contribute to all sorts of errors (e.g. interpretative, strategic, stylistic, etc.) in their language production.

I believe, however, CCQs aren't limited to the domain of EFL teachers. Our students can make good use of them too.

I was tapping into my personal experience of learning German noun, adjective and article endings. Like many German learners who use English as the referential anchor, I always joked we had it much simpler than the 'infinite' number of German cases and endings. Nevertheless, it is my German teacher, Beate, who I have to thank for helping me attain mastery of this system. (I'm still making loads of mistakes because of noun gender, but that's another story.) She explained how it works by giving me four self-checking questions.

For those of you interested in the self-checking questions, here they are:

1. What gender is the singular/plural noun?
2. Is there an article in the sentence? (Do we need one?)
3. If there is an article, does it already carry the gender ending?
4. What case is the object noun in the sentence?

Gestern habe ich ein blaues Fahrrad gekauft. [I bought a blue bicycle yesterday.]

1. Fahrrad is a neutral noun. It is singular in this sentence.
2. We need an article because Fahrrad is singular countable.
3. The indefinite article ein is not inflected; it can signal either the masculine or neutral gender.
4. Fahrrad is in the akkusativ, not dativ, case because of the verb gekauft. The indefinite article ein is sufficient (eines is in the genetive case), but we have the adjective blaues, which carries the -es netural gender ending.

After using these self-checking questions for a gazillion times, I have internalised the entire system to the point of reducing my formulation ('thinking') time down to less than a mere second! In other words, it has become an automatised process for me in speaking and writing.

If we transfer the above learning experience to the English language, teachers may be able to go a step further by giving their students self-checking questions where appropriate. In turn, the students can ask such questions outside the classroom, which would enable them to move closer towards internalising the use of a target language. To this end, collaborative 'guided discovery' tasks with checking questions (CCQs) are a great teaching tool.