26th Conference of English Teaching and Learning in the R.O.C.

A Holistic English Classroom through Drama: Applied

Drama Techniques, Process Drama, and Readers Theatre

Liangfong Hsu, Shin-Mei Kao, Gary Carkin

Tainan U. of Technology, National Cheng Kung U., Southern New Hampshire U.
td0011@mail.tut.edu.tw

This study explored the effect of using drama as a learning tool on the improvement of college
students’ English ability after a three-week intensive course. Applied drama techniques were used in the first
week as orientation activities to familiarize students who had not been exposed to this kind of learning method,
such as verbal games, body movements, mimes, strategic interaction and role-play. The second week was
devoted to learning through three process dramas. Process drama refers to educational drama that is created by
the participants. It may make use of a story’s beginning, middle, and end to explore, develop, and express ideas
and feelings through dramatic enactment. It is, however, always improvised drama, participant centered, and
not intended for an audience. In the third week, the students used Readers Theatre format to perform a script
created from their learning and improvisation content in the second week.
The participants were evaluated by GEPT Intermediate level test before and after the course as the pre-
and post-study evaluation and the results of these underwent statistical analysis. The results showed that the
participants had made significant progress only in speaking ability, with trivial difference in listening, reading
and writing abilities.
Below are some key comments by the participants:
1. Students believed that learners with low-proficiency and low-confidence could benefit greatly from
drama; 2. They thought drama provided them with a broad range of opportunity in learning English; 3. Overall,
they thought drama could motivate them to, and give them confidence in, learning English.

Key words: applied drama techniques, process drama, Readers Theatre, GEPT intermediate test

INTRODUCTION

The traditional way of separating the four skills in English learning curriculum is
considered dogmatic and difficult to implement in actual practice either in the classroom or in
real life. Only a holistic teaching and learning method can reflect the actual language
practice. Because drama fosters a virtual environment which gives meaning to language
practice, it provides a holistic instruction and learning methodology.
New techniques of teaching English through drama emerge constantly and adaptations
of older methods evolve. In this study, the authors combined a variety of applied drama
techniques, process drama and readers theatre to explore the impacts on the participants when

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such innovative approaches were integrated in an intensive course. In general, Taiwanese

college students, especially technological college students, are not familiar with drama; they
tend to shun it. They think they might be required to “act.” Therefore, it is crucial to orient
the students to drama through various dramatic activities in the beginning, such as verbal
games, body movements, mimes, story-building, strategic interaction, and role-play. The
applied drama techniques were structured by levels of sophistication and difficulty and later
incorporated in the dramatic structures of the process drama and readers theater.
Process drama offers many opportunities for negotiation and input of the participants.
Essentially, it is the product of a collaborative meaning-making process by all the participants
through the medium of role. In the procedure, the participants are constantly required to
listen, speak, read, and write attentively in order to respond to each other and contribute ideas
to the story or task on hand. One of the three process dramas derived in this study is
developed into a performing script for the Readers Theatre format in the third week. Readers
Theatre was included in the study because it can enhance the participants’ reading fluency
through repeated reading of the script for an anticipated performance. From repeated
rehearsing, the participants learn to enunciate and articulate their lines.
This study explored the effects of using drama as a learning process for the
development of English reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. The subjects were
Taiwanese university students of low to intermediate proficiency who were inexperienced in
the use of drama to learn language. Applied drama techniques were used in the first week to
familiarize students with drama exercises and methods. The second week was devoted to
learning English through three process dramas. In the third week, the students used readers
theatre format to perform a script developed through the use of the process drama of the
second week.

What Is Process Drama?

Process drama, a type of educational drama, differs from drama methodologies in

which the performance of a play is the focus. Heathcote (1984, p.49) defines the educational
drama thus: “A broad definition of educational drama is “role-taking”, either to understand a
social situation more thoroughly or to experience imaginatively via identification in social
situations. Dramatic activity is the direct result of the ability to role-play – to want to know
how it feels to be in someone else’s shoes.”
The term process drama (Haseman, 1991; O’Tool, 1992; O’Neill, 1995) is a relatively
new term in drama education. O’Neill (1995) used the term to describe the “pre-text” and the
development of a drama created by the participants. The teacher starts the session with a
situation but leads to a discussion about what had led up to the situation. The participants
gradually build up a background. Taking time to work this way, the group of participants
expands a body of information, deepens understanding, and develops a richer and more
interesting interpretation and enactment. Kao & O’Neill (1998) further explain that process
drama is extended over time and built up from the ideas, negotiations, and responses of all the
participants in order to cultivate social, intellectual and linguistic development.
Stinson and Freebody (2006, p.29) believe that, while each process drama is carefully
pre-planned, the structure offers many opportunities for negotiation and input by the

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participants. Process dramas are designed to offer chances for individuals and groups to
contribute to the dramatic action, to solve problems and to employ higher-order thinking
processes. They do not lead to performances of the devised materials to audiences who are
outside of the drama.

What Is Readers Theatre?

Readers theatre developed after World War II from the speech and drama fields of oral
interpretation and conventional theatre (Adams, 2003) and differs from traditional plays in
that the readers (or performers) do not memorize lines but read directly from the script. It
was originally developed by and for adults but was quickly adapted for use with older
children. Most readers theatre performances are arranged to have the actors stand or sit on a
stage or other performance area (Kerry Moran, 2006, p.317). No attempt is made to hide the
scripts that the performers hold in folders or place on lecterns in front of them. Lines are
distributed among individuals, pairs, small groups, and the whole group (Flynn, 2004, p.
360).
Readers theatre is a minimal theatrical performance requiring students to express meaning
through fluent and prosodic readings of scripted stories, poems, chants, and rhymes. It does
not require the use of props, costumes, or scenery. Staging and movement is kept to a
minimum. Students’ voices are the only tool used to communicate meaning or to bring
character to life. There is no attempt to create a sense of reality on stage because it is co-
constructed between readers and the audience. The readers participate in this joint project by
suggesting interpretations through fluent or expressive reading while the audience uses his or
her imagination to complete the meaning making.
Fluency gains may be associated with readers theatre participation (Millin & Rinehar,
1999). One possible explanation for the improvement is that readers theatre demands
repeated reading during the rehearsal stage for an anticipated performance. The desire to put
on a performance is more motivating than simply requiring that a story be read a prescribed
number of times. Most importantly, the increased reading fluency does not end with texts
that have been practiced but carries over to new and unpracticed texts (Tyler & Chard, 2000).

RESEARCH METHOD

Participants

The participating students were 32 female university students who volunteered to take a
special intensive summer course entitled Holistic English at Tainan University of Technology.
They came from the four year, two year, five year, seven year and graduate programs of
various departments, including music, accounting, childcare, finance, international trades,

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foreign languages, fine arts, product design, fashion design, and styling & cosmetology. The
student’s level of English varied from high beginner to intermediate.

Course Design

The course was a three week intensive course which met for 3 hours a day, five days a
week, for a total of 45 hours of class time. The first week was devoted to the use of applied
dramatic techniques, the second week involved three process dramas, and the third week was
dedicated to readers theatre. The work of each week built upon that of the previous; thus, the
applied drama techniques were structured by levels of sophistication and difficulty and later
incorporated in the dramatic structures of the process drama. Likewise, the readers theatre
incorporated a story and some of the work developed during the second week of process
drama methodology. The course was co-conducted by Dr. Shin-Mei Kao, a process drama
expert, and Dr. Gary Carkin, who specialized in readers theatre and directing of theatre
productions, with the researcher-observer, Dr. Liangfong Hsu, in the classroom.

The First Week: Applied Drama Techniques. The various drama techniques include
games for concentration, pronunciation, image building, body movement, verbal exercises,
story building, dramatic reading of short plays, strategic interaction, structured improvisation,
and process drama episodes.

The Second Week: Process Drama. There are three carefully pre-planned processes.
The first one is The Seal Wife, an Irish folk tale, taken from the book entitled Pretext and
Storydrama: The Artistry of O’Neill and Booth by Philip Taylor (1992). The picture book
used is The Seal Mother by Mordecai Gerstein (1986). The instructor has designed 9 steps in
the structure:
Step 1. The pre-text is launched;
Step 2. Transforming the pre-text;
Step 3. Forming the community;
Step 4. The family;
Step 5. The private dream worlds;
Step 6. Ten years after the wife has left;
Step 7. Patrick’s song;
Step 8. A thousand years later.
The second process drama is based on the picture book entitled Tuesday by David Weisner
(1994).
Step 1. Creating the pre-text;
Step 2. Investigating the case;
Step 3. Forming a village meeting;
Step 4. Meeting the strange creature;

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Step 5. Interviewing the monster;

Step 6. Report Writing.
The third process drama is The Lost Tribe based on “The Lost Valley” in Drama Structures:
A practical Handbook for Teachers by Cecily O’Neill and Alan Lambert.
Step 1. Exploring the pre-text;
Step 2. Organizing an exploration team;
Step 3. An Official Photo;
Step 4. Arriving in the Valley;
Step 5. Life in the valley;
Step 6. Returning Home.

The Third Week: Readers Theatre. The class work now turned to the construction of a
readers theatre piece to be prepared for performing and videotaping as a final product. The
Seal Wife was selected as being appropriate because the students had enjoyed working
through the material in terms of the process drama and the material itself contained many
moments of dramatic tension. The story is enlarged by incorporating the end of the story and
additional narration written by the workshop leaders. The presentation of the Seal Wife was
created according to the following steps:
Step 1. The Introduction;
Step 2. Integrating the scenes;
Step 3. Polishing the spoken word;
Step 4. Developing performance style;
Step 5. Developing the flow;
Step 6. Developing timing and flow & polishing language;
Step 7. Performance.

Data Collection

The students were evaluated by GEPT Intermediate level test before and after the course
as the pre- and post-study evaluation. The GEPT test contains four parts: listening, reading,
speaking, and writing. Both the listening and reading sections contain multiple choice
questions only and thus, were scored by computer. The oral test contains reading aloud,
answering short questions, and describing a picture. The writing test contains a Chinese-to-
English translation task and a short essay-writing task. The latter two tests were evaluated
manually by two trained instructors. Two independent raters measured the quantity and
quality of student oral and written production. The two raters received training regarding the
scoring standards and procedures prior to their actual scoring. Their evaluation has
achieved .92 inter-rater reliability. The average between the two sets of scores serves as the
final scores of the students.

The Results

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The simple paired t-test procedures between the pre- and the post-tests were performed
to evaluate the progress of the participants in the four skills during this course.
Table 1.
The Results of Paired t-Tests on the Four Skills
Skill Test n M SD MD t df Sig.
Listening Pretest 20 72.6355
Posttest 20 66.8110 14.4956 3.2413 1.797 19 0.088
Reading Pretest 20 49.6410
Posttest 20 48.1725 11.4290 2.5556 0.575 19 0.572
Speaking Pretest 17 35.1176
Posttest 17 43.5588 15.8813 4.0987 -2.192 16 0.0436*
Writing Pretest 14 15.7500
Posttest 14 19.3929 9.0116 2.4084 -1.513 13 0.154
Note. *p<.05.
The results in Table 1 show that the participants made a significant progress in speaking
(p=0.0436). Though their writing skill has improved after receiving the instruction, the
progress has not reached a significant level (p=0.154). Surprisingly, the students’
performance in listening and reading did not show any progress. To further examine the
students’ progress in writing, we performed the paired t-tests on the following five subsets in
writing quantity: total words, total sentences, total clauses, mean length of sentence, and
mean length of clause.

Table 2.
The Results of Paired t-Tests on the Quantitative Indexes of Writing
Skill Test n M SD MD t df Sig.
T. Words Pretest 18 61.0556
Posttest 18 56.7778 51.1248 12.0502 117 0.727
T. Sentences Pretest 18 4.8889
Posttest 18 6.8333 4.1084 0.9684 17 0.030*
T. Clause Pretest 18 8.8889
Posttest 18 10.3889 7.0731 1.6672 17 0.035*
MLS Pretest 18 11.0533
Posttest 18 6.8411 9.2739 2.1859 17 0.154
MLC Pretest 18 5.5967
Pretest 18 4.2544 3.5409 0.8346 17 0.126
Notes. *p<.05.
MLS=Mean Length of Sentence
MLC=Mean Length of Clause

Table 2 shows that the participants had written significantly more sentences in the post-
writing test (p=0.030) but the mean length of sentence has decreased significantly (p=0.035).
No significant differences were found among the other three subsets of writing quality. It is
noted that the participants had produced fewer words in total in the post-writing test. Since

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their writing scores, which measure their writing quality, are higher in the post test, we
logically deduce that the students could express their ideas more effectively with fewer words
and more sentences.

DISCUSSION

Although the study shows that significant improvement in speaking was made by the
end of the program, the students’ reading, listening and writing skills did not have any
significant progress. To the surprise of the researchers, even though the students have made
slight improvement in writing, their listening and reading scores have decreased in the post
tests. There are some possible explanations. Fist, this course emphasized fluency over
accuracy in speaking and writing, and did not include grammar instruction. The reading
materials for the class were selected to facilitate the development of drama. In this manner,
the students were not taught specifically for taking a standardized test such as the GEPT used
for the pre- and post-evaluation.
Other explanations are chiefly due to the technical difficulties and limitations of the
study.

Technical difficulties

The students’ English level. Because this course is a free course in the summer, it is
difficult to get sufficient number of students with intermediate English level. The 32 students
recruited are of high beginning to intermediate levels.

The selection of GEPT test level. Since the students’ English level varied from high
beginning to intermediate, the selection of GEPT test level is difficult. In this study, the
intermediate level test of GEPT was implemented. However, it posed some difficulties for
the students of the study, especially the reading test. It requires a certain amount of
vocabulary in order to comprehend the test articles. No wonder some of them simply gave up
the reading test in the middle without completing the test, especially after the physically
demanding performance (the post-test was taken immediately after the final production).

Technical flaw involved in testing. Due to mechanical problem, the students’ oral
answers were not always recorded successfully or the students’ marked answers sometimes
were not registered on the computer, which resulted in incomplete data for analysis.

Limitations of the study

Students’ relatively lower English proficiency. The students were of lower English
proficiency, inviting the use of their first language when planning, negotiating, and designing
presentations. Although the delivery of the exercises was done in the target language, much
learning time was reduced by the student’s inability to explain, instruct, direct, and question
using English during the planning stages of the exercises because of their relatively lower
English language proficiency.

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The short duration of the study. Since the students meet every day, there is not enough
time for doing research, through which the students can build reading & writing abilities.

Suggestions for further studies

Analysis might involve examining how skills develop through the use of drama starting
with beginners and moving through advanced levels of teaching English through drama. In
addition, more comparison studies are needed that compare the effects of the use of various
applied drama techniques to those of process drama and other genres of drama in language
education.

Additional Findings

In order to better understand the positive effect of this type of project, it is important to
take into consideration what the participants themselves had to say about it. The following
characteristic comments were given by the participants:

1. Students with low proficiency and low confidence can benefit greatly from drama
activities, just like the “good” students.
2. Students can benefit from participating in group-work as well as in pairs.
3. Drama provides them with a broad range of opportunities in learning English.
4. Drama motivates them to learn English and gives them more confidence to learn
English.

CONCLUSION

Learning English through drama facilitates the implement of four skills of English. In the
structure of a combination of applied drama techniques, process drama and readers theatre,
the participants are constantly interacting with each other and actively contributing ideas to
the creative tasks on hand. In the process, they need to express themselves clearly, listen to
other people attentively, reading stories and information, and writing dialogues, scripts, and
journals. In the final readers theatre performance, the participants improve their fluency
through repeated reading practice. Most of the participants found that a holistic English
classroom through various drama methodologies is fun, motivational and can boost their
confidence in learning English. As a matter of fact, the participants have improved
significantly on speaking and made a slight progress on their writing within a short span of

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three weeks. With adjustments in course design, there is a great potential for enhancement on
the other two skills as well, which awaits further research to prove.

References

Adams, W. (2003). Institute book of readers theatre: A practical guide for school, theatre, &
community. Chapel Hill, NC: Professional Press.
Flynn, R. M. (2004). Curriculum-Based Readers Theatre: Setting the Stage for reading and
retention. International Reading Association, 360-365.
Gerstein, M. (1986). The Seal Mother. New York: Dial Books.
Haseman, B. (1991). Improvisation, Process Drama and Dramatic Art. London Drama, Jul,
19-21.
Kao, S., & O’Neill, C. (1998). Words into worlds: Learning a second language through
process drama. Standford: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Kerry Moran, K. J. (2006). Nurturing Emergent Readers Through Readers Theatre. Early
Childhood Educational Journal, 33(5), 317-323.
Millin, S. K., & Rinehart, S. D. (1999). Some of the benefits of readers theatre participation
for second-grade Title I students. Reading Research and Instruction, 39(1), 71-88.
O’Neill, C., & Lambert, A. (1982). Drama Structures: A Practical Handbook for Teachers.
London: Hutchison.
O’Neill, C. (1995). Dramaworlds: A framework for process drama. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
O’Toole, J. (1992). The process of drama: Negotiating art and meaning. London:
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Taylor, P. (1992). Pretext and Storydrama: The Artistry of O’Neill and Booth. Brisbane,
Australia: NADIE Publications.
Stinson, M., & Freebody, K. (2006). The Doll Project: The Contribution of Process Drama to
Improved Results in English Oral Communication. Youth Theatre Journal, 20, 27-41.
Tyler, B., & Chard, D (2000). Using readers theatre to foster fluency in struggling readers: A
twist on the repeated reading strategy. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 16, 163-168.
Weisner, D. (1994). Tuesday. New York: Clarion Books.