How to Use Theatre to Teach English

Theatre is effective in building language skills.

Theatre is an effective tool teachers can use to build language, writing, reading comprehension and critical thinking skills in students. Through a variety of theater activities, students can develop tools to understand unfamiliar vocabulary, analyze characters and create their own dramatic texts.

Instructions

1. Read plays aloud in class. Assign parts to students and have them perform scenes for their classmates. After a scene is performed, ask students to analyze what happened in the scene. Make sure they understood the characters' motives and what each character wanted out of the scene. Ask students how they knew what each character wanted. How did the characters' actions reveal their intentions?

2. Make a list of unfamiliar words from the script. Discuss each word, allowing the students to discuss possible meanings based on the scene that was just performed. For example, if the unfamiliar word is "disingenuous," ask students what the actors were doing in their performance that might have seemed disingenuous. After the discussion, have students look up the word's definition in the dictionary.

3. Reinforce new vocabulary by having students act out new words. For example, if "disingenuous" is the word, select two student actors to come to the front and assign one of them the character trait of being disingenuous. Instruct students to improvise a scene where this character trait is evident. If teaching younger children, pantomimed scenes with no words are good for acting out simpler vocabulary words. Young children will enjoy acting out descriptive words like scared, happy and sad or action words like jump, climb and tussle.

4. Write a monologue from the perspective of a character. This forces students to get inside the character's head, allowing for a higher level of comprehension when reading the material. Have a monologue festival and invite students to perform their monologues for the class.

5. Put on a class play. The process of writing, rehearsing and performing a play will offer many opportunities to learn new vocabulary in a wide range of contexts. Students not only will learn vocabulary relevant to the context of the story, but also vocabulary relevant to theatrical productions.

References

• Iteslj: Drama Techniques for Teaching English
• BBC: Using Drama Texts in the Classroom
• Theater Amoeba: English Through Theatre