an English through Drama course

From improvisation to publication on an English through Drama course Charlyn Wessels

The creative work of students - essays, video productions, and tape recordings - can be a rich source of authentic materials for the EFL teacher who often has to worry about copyright restrictions on published texts. This article describes how plays can be improvisedand written by students, and how the end-products can be modified in a variety of ways to create new teaching material. In one instance, a soap opera created in this way was rewritten by one group of students and their teacher as a class reader which is due to be published by Macmillan as part of their new ‘Bookshelf series of readers.

Background: The English through Drama course

Stevenson College in Edinburgh offers an EFL course for upperintermediate and advanced students which is based entirely on drama techniques. The course includes classes on pronunciation, spoken communication skills, theatre workshop activities, literature, and play production. Theatre and cinema visits form an integral part of the course, which runs for ten hours a week for a total length of three months, and can be taken by both part-time and full-time students. A maximum of fourteen students can participate in the course each term. The heart of the course is the improvisation of a full-length play (usually 20-25 pages in length) by the class, and this end-product is usually performed at the end of term in front of an enthusiastic audience of fellow-students, teachers, and guests. Past productions have included the following titles: Soap Opera, Soap 2 - the sequel, That’s what I want! (about a bank robbery that goes wrong), and City of Women (about a world in which women control everything).

The stages towards an endproduct

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In the first week of the course, the class has to be transformed into a group of people willing to work together in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. This is achieved through a range of group-dynamic activities, both verbal and non-verbal, such as warm-up and relaxation activities, name games, pair games, and group games. An example of a pair activity is ‘Mirrors’, where one partner mirrors the actions of the other. And a popular group game is ‘Parties’, where the entire group has a party in a variety of ways - as a group of philosophers, as punks, as babies, as animals, and so on. ELT Journal Volume 45/3 July 1991 © Oxford University Press 1991

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Next, the group needs to be familiarized with learning through drama. This is done through a range of theatre workshops, each of which focuses on a different aspect like movement and mime, improvisation, scenework, and drama voice-production. These sessions always begin with warm-up and relaxation activities, and end with a cool-down aimed

Figure 1: Questionnaire for the second week of the course

QUESTIONNAIRE Choosing a play and a character 1 Read the brief description of the different types of genres, and then list, in order of preference, the type of play you would like the group to do. Use numbers to indicate your preferences, e.g. first choice [1] , second choice [2] , etc. a. Domestic plays - mainly concerned with relationships within a family, either comic or serious. b. Crime and detection plays - murders, bank robberies, etc. c. Death, grief, and social embarrassment plays - plays that highlight the more painful side of life either in a direct or surreal/absurdist manner. d. Melodramas - sensational, often sentimental, plays with improbable plots dealing with exciting and sometimes shocking events. These tend to have standard stereotyped characters, e.g. villain, noble hero, suffering heroine. e. Parable plays - plays which teach a moral lesson or general truth drawn from the events and characters in the play. f. Historical plays - plays that cover dramatic episodes in the lives of wellknown people in history.

2 What type of role do YOU see yourself

[] []

[] [] []

in?

a. romantic hero(ine) b. villain c. detective d. comic character e. voice of wisdom and reason f. strong, silent type g. person of mystery (e.g. angel, god, deus-ex-machina) h. nasty, vicious person i. ‘angry young man/woman’ j. kind, gentle person

3 Here are the plots of a number of one-act plays. If you would practise extracts from some of these, state your preference.

like us to

a. Us and Them: Two groups of people looking for a place to settle meet on the same piece of land. They divide the land, first with a line, then with a wall. From there on, the trouble begins. b. Look - Sea!: Various characters, including holiday-makers, a marine biologist, the captain of an oil tanker, politicians, and a poet, react in different ways to the pollution of the oceans. c. The Patient: Someone has tried to kill Jenny Wingfield. He or she will certainly try again - unless Dr Ginsberg and Inspector Cray can prevent a murder. d. The Man who wouldn’t go to Heaven: People arrive at the gates of Paradise. They are welcomed by the Angel Gabriel, although most of them don’t understand why they were sent to Heaven. But one man refuses to enter Heaven - he thinks it is all a pack of lies. e. The Man in the Bowler Hat: Madcap melodrama about John and Mary whose humdrum lives are suddenly invaded by sensational characters in search of the Rajah’s Ruby. f. Pullman Car Hiawatha: On an interstate train between New York and Chicago, the dreams, failures, and simple lives of the passengers become interwoven with commentary from a range of external characters who have contributed to the development of the railways (and thereby to the development of the country) and the sudden death of one traveller.

Improvisation through drama

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at releasing tension built up during the during the warm-up of this article are activities.)

and dissipating any negative energy which may have session. Carefully selected music plays a vital role and the cool-down phases. (The references at the end sources of group-dynamic and theatre-workshop

The second week of the course starts with a questionnaire (see Figure 1) which is aimed at getting students to think about the type of play they would like to do, and the kind of character they would each like to portray. They answer the questions individually, and then discuss their answers, first in pairs, then groups, then as a whole class plenary, thereby gradually reaching consensus on what they would like to do. When they have finished discussing their responses to the questionnaire, the group decides on a plot and characters for their own play. This is done through brainstorming, and all the ideas are discussed until a consensus is reached. Gradually, a story-line is developed, as well as the role of each character in the story. The teacher notes down this development on the blackboard, and draws a rough ‘tree’ to show the relationships between the characters. The relationship tree developed for Soup Opera by a class of eleven students is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: One group’s relationship tree for Soap Opera

The Collins family

The Rawlins family

Each student then writes, as a homework assignment, a detailed character profile of the character he or she is going to portray. It is quite important to let each student develop his or her own character first, before the final plot is agreed on, because the story will develop from the inter-relationship between the characters. Finally, an outline for the scenes is drawn up by the teacher and the class, and the actual work of improvising the scenes can begin. The draft outline for Soap Opera was as follows: Scene 1 - Sarah’s birthday (to introduce the Collins family) Scene 2 - Narita airport, Tokyo (to introduce the Rawlins family) Scene 3 - The offices of Allied Enterprises (Alan and Rick meet John) Scene 4 - Home life (both families) 232

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scene scene scelte scene

5 - Sarah and Yoshi fall in love 6 - Elizabeth and John meet again: the terrible secret is revealed 7 - Alan sets fire to the office 8 - A happy ending?

The draft outline simply serves as an initial guide, because the story-line can still change depending on its improvised development and the strengths and weaknesses of individual characters. The more ‘kitchensink’ the initial story-line is, the easier it will be for students to identify with the situation, but more advanced students also enjoy fantasy and surrealism. the scenes and creating a script

Improvising

Two days a week are set aside for improvising the play. These sessions begin with a discussion on the scene to be improvised, and a brief outline of the scene is noted down on the board. The scenes need not be improvised sequentially - it is perfectly permissible to jump from improvising scenes l-3 to scene 8, as some scenes may prove more difficult to construct than others, and the solution to these scenes can often be found by first working out later ones. As in normal theatre workshop sessions, the group then warms up physically and vocally, and also does a number of group dynamic activities to relax bodies and sharpen concentration. The group then splits up into: a. the characters required for the scene; and b. ‘scribes’ (i.e. students who note down as much as possible of the dialogue produced by the characters). But although the characters do all the acting, every member of the group assists in creating the dialogue and ‘blocking’ (i.e. planning and practising) the necessary movements. With numerous repetitions, a scene begins to emerge - usually within an hour. Throughout the improvisation, the actors are reminded by the teacher to remain ‘in role’ and to ask themselves constantly what their characters would do in a given situation, and how this would affect their interaction with others. There follows a sample of an improvisation in progress, recorded during one session; the group was working on scene 6 of Soap Opera : Elizabeth

and John are meeting

in secret for the first time in years

You haven’t changed. Well, you have.

ELIZABETH: JOHN:

(interrupting): Just a minute! Surely John wouldn’t be so nasty to his former lover? I thought he was a nice guy. ACTOR PLAYING JOHN: Well, I think he’s still very angry because she left him for Alan. SCRIBE: But would he really be so cruel? ACTOR PLAYING JOHN: Oh, yes! TEACHER: How d’you know? ACTOR PLAYING JOHN: Look, I made him up, so I should know! TEACHER: You’re absolutely right. Continue. SCRIBE

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Improvisation through drama

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The above exchange not only shows how students identify closely with the characters they create themselves, but also illustrates how much intensive language practice students can get through improvisation; because with improvisation we have both learning and acquisition (see Krashen, 1982) at work. The students learn the correct language required for the endproduct, and also acquire a good deal through the informal yet focused discussion which helps to create the scene, as they offer ideas, agree or disagree with each other, and describe possible actions. Because they are creating the play themselves, rather than responding to an existing text, there is usually no shortage of ideas, nor any unwillingness to contribute to the developing scenes. As with normal spoken communication skills classes, these sessions end with language feedback from the teacher, during which recurrent errors (from the actual improvisation as well as the discussions) are corrected. At the end of the session, all the scribes’ notes are gathered together and, handed over to either one or two students, who write out the complete scene for homework. Each student in the group will have the chance either to write or to co-write a complete scene. The teacher edits the written scene, checking for errors in style, grammar, and vocabulary. The corrected version is then typed out and copies are given to the students, who are always delighted to see their own ideas in print. This scene-writing, together with the reviews the students write after they have seen a film or a play, ensures that the course has a writing component as well as an aural/oral one. A further writing assignment is the keeping of a ‘character diary’, which records events that happen to individual characters as the play develops. The following is a diary entry made by one of the Soap Opera students: NAME SCENE:

OF CHARACTER:

Yoshi Rawlins

One

Flew from Tokyo to London with Dad and Mom. Miserable to leave school pals and grandparents, but excited at thought of new life in Britain. Met at airport by Dad’s new secretary, Jean. Boy, what a dish! My new school (which Dad also attended) is called St Paul’s Once all the scenes have been created in the manner described above, the more formal type of rehearsals with the complete script take place (see Wessels, 1987, Ch. 9). But here, too, we have managed to minimize the dominance of the teacher, by allowing individual students to direct certain scenes. This is a very practical and enjoyable way of introducing the language and intonation of tact and diplomacy; for example: ‘That was very good, but don’t you think . . .?’ ‘With a little more emotion, you should be able to . . .’ ‘What do you think about/How do you feel about trying it out in this way?’ ‘If you put the emphasis on that word, the meaning would be clearer . . .’ ‘Darling, you were wonderful! I’d just like the audience to see more of your lovely face, so how about looking up occasionally?’ 234

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And throughout the rehearsal phase, the script can still be changed and enlivened by different ideas from the group. At this stage, we use the weekly pronunciation class to concentrate on correcting recurrent problems with the word stress, sentence stress, rhythm, and intonation of the newly-created dialogue. Weaker students are also withdrawn from the group for individual assistance. Towards the end of the rehearsal phase (usually two to three weeks), photographs are taken, tape-recordings are made of scenes, and a video-recording is made of the whole play. Then the performance is held, bringing the course to an exciting and rewarding conclusion. Creating new teaching materials from an improvised play

From our improvised plays, we have been able to develop new teaching material for a range of levels (elementary to upper-intermediate), to cover all the skills: Reading - using the complete script (with or without the audio or videorecording), or, as in the case of Soup Opera, transforming it into a class reader (to be published in 1991); Listening - to individual scenes from the tape-recordings or watching the video and answering comprehension questions; Pronunciation - using the dialogue to teach or revise those aspects of speech mentioned above; with more advanced students, analysing pronunciation errors made on the tape-recording or video; Speaking - matching photographs with correct extracts from the play; improvising different endings to scenes; discussing the characters; Grammar - using the text to create cloze tests and exercises on prepositions, idioms, verb tenses, reported speech, and word-order; Writing - re-arranging ‘jumbled’ scenes; writing alternative scenes. So the course is not only beneficial to the students, but also to the teachers who can create banks of new material out of such ‘home-made’ products, without worrying about copyright restrictions.

Conclusion

Student feedback at the end of each course has been very positive, and we now offer a second English through Drama course for lower-intermediate and intermediate students. We also run a special drama option class once a week for anyone who wishes to attend. Here are some responses from students on the last upper-intermediate to advanced course: ‘A significant experience I’ll never forget’ - Kumiko (Japanese, 50) ‘Improving my English by creating was fantastic’ - Gerardo (Italian, 37) ‘I’ve improved my English, had fun, and I’ve got to know my friends much better - what more can I ask of a course?‘ - Sylvie (French, 20) ‘In Drama we live the language’ - Tereza (Spanish, 29). And what effect does teaching through drama have on teachers? Well, those of us who use it as our main teaching technique freely admit that it is Improvisation through drama

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physically and mentally demanding, young and staves off apathy! Received

October I990

References and suggested reading Butterfield, A. and A. Sieveking. 1989. Drama through language through Drama. Kemble Press. Hayes, S. 1984. Drama as a Second Language. NEC. Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Kerridge, H. and C. Wessels. 1987. ‘The Drama

option - language learning with a difference’. MET 15/2. Wessels, C. 1987. Drama. (Oxford Resource Books for Teachers). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wessels, C. et al. 1991. Soap Opera. (Macmilian Bookshelf Readers). London: Macmillan.

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but it certainly helps to keep us

The author Charlyn Wessels has taught EFL/ESL

in the UK, Germany, and Africa. She has an MSc in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. Her major research interests are teaching through drama and the teaching of pronunciation. She is author of Drama (Oxford Resource Books for Teachers series). She is a senior lecturer at Stevenson College, Edinburgh, and also the college’s equal opportunities co-ordinator.

Charlyn Wessels

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