I recently had the opportunity to design a language workshop for students on the condition that it had to be different from their usual classroom activities. I saw this as the perfect chance to experiment with drama, and, to my surprise, it turned out to be a success. Drama-based activities offer several advantages: they allow for the natural integration of language skills, can be easily adapted to suit students’ proficiency levels, and are often low-prep. They are also a lot of fun.
For the workshop, I had four hours to explore drama, but I soon started wondering how I could bring those activities into a regular classroom, with its time constraints and curriculum demands. Below, I share practical ways you can weave drama into your lessons.
Turning a Sentence into a Dramatization
Grammar and vocabulary lessons often rely on gap-fill exercises that can be developed into much richer tasks. One way is to ask learners to create a text or a dialogue that provides more context for the target language and reinforces it. Whenever you plan to use grammar or vocabulary gap-fill exercises that are based on single sentences, choose those sentences that can be transformed into a short dialogue by adding at least one sentence before and one after (or more, depending on your time and students’ level).
Once the dialogues are written, learners can read them in pairs. To extend the task, encourage them to enhance their scripts by adding stage directions, turning the dialogue into mini dramatization.
Bringing the Dialogue to Life
If there are some ready-made dialogues available (such as those used to teach functional language, e.g., thanking, suggesting/responding to suggestions, etc.) there are several ways to get students to perform them in ways that develop their pronunciation skills.
To focus on sentence stress, ask students to experiment by shifting stress in different parts of the sentence to change meaning or emphasis. Ask learners to work in pairs and be there to support them if they disagree about where to place the stress.
To practice voice quality, hand out slips of paper with adjectives on them (young, old, calm, sad etc.). Students first work in small groups, taking turns reading their lines in a way that matches the adjective they got. Then, invite a few groups to demonstrate for the whole class, while the others listen and try to guess which adjective is being acted out.
Speaking Without Speaking
When teaching speaking skills, one area that is often overlooked is back-channelling, particularly non-verbal listener responses, such as gestures, to what is being said. Drama activities are well suited to raise awareness of both the importance and the use of non-verbal communications signals.
One such activity involves preparing slips of paper with different examples of non-verbal back-channelling (e.g., avoiding eye contact, folding arms, nodding excessively), which are then assigned to each learner. While working on a speaking task in pairs or groups, a student must subtly incorporate their assigned behaviour, while others try to guess what it is. Afterwards, ask them to discuss their observations and how these behaviours affected communication.
Conclusion
When it comes to experimenting in teaching, you often do not need much – just a willingness to try something new. Start with one of those activities and be ready to discover a whole new side to your learners’ creativity and enthusiasm.
References
Almond, A. (2019). Putting the human centre stage. Pavilion Publishing and Media.
Maley, A., & Duff, A. (2005). Drama techniques: A resource book of communication activities for language teachers (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Walkley, A., & Dellar, H. (2016). Teaching lexically: Principles and practice. Delta Publishing.
Woolard, G. (2013). Messaging: Beyond a lexical approach in ELT. The Round.
Victoria Romanchykova is a Delta-certified ESL teacher who has been working with adult learners in diverse contexts for over five years. She values simplicity in teaching, with a strong focus on learners’ needs and goals. Her main interests include task-based language teaching, listening and speaking skills, and teacher education.
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