THE PLAY'S THE THING!
How inspirational Palestinian students gave me the confidence to try something new in the ESOL classroom.
Amanda Avison
In June 2019 I attended the NATECLA England conference in Birmingham where Nick Bilbrough, who was one of the keynote speakers, gave an interactive presentation entitled the play’s the thing. As a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, I’m very keen on pronunciation and developing spoken English for communication. Although I use a communicative approach to language learning, incorporating dialogues, role plays and personalized practice, I had never had the confidence to try plays in the classroom. So, what changed my mind? It was three things: the persuasive and practical talk from Nick, the hard work and dedication of the input of the Palestinian teachers, and, by far the biggest factor, the attitude and talent of the Palestinian students.
I was so impressed by the short clips that we saw that I bought Toothbrush and other plays. This inspired me further because, apart from the engaging plays, in it I saw some of the fundamental learning principles that I try to develop in my own classroom:
Students using their own experiences
Students using their own language with learning input and development
A collaborative experience
Although I could see great potential, I was still uncertain as to whether I could translate this into an adult only environment of very low level English learners many of whom lacked confidence in speaking. But I gave it go and I’m proud to say that the day before our college closed for lockdown in March 2020, our elementary English class performed 4 plays for each other in a highly entertaining afternoon.
That was the inspiration! How did I go about it? For anyone who might want to try doing plays, here is one way of approaching it and some of the things I learned along the way. This is based on a follow up workshop that I gave at the NATECLA Scotland conference in 2020.
Meet the class.
Level: elementary Age: 30-63 9 nationalities
40 hours of work Working with volunteers as well
Key point to remember: “Plays in a foreign language performed in a classroom are intended to benefit the participants rather than the audience: the process is what’s important and the performance is the goal.”
Nick Bilbrough
The stages:
Storytelling
Students shared traditional, oral stories from their countries.
What was so interesting was the similarities in the stories that different cultures tell and sharing this in the class was a fascinating experience.
Students worked collaboratively with their choice of picture prompts to make up stories.
Using existing stories/plays
I used the excellent, free, downloadable resource: Stories Alive! by Nick Bilbrough. It helped me enormously to work with existing material and then adapt it to the development stage the class were at. I used many of the varied ideas of how to use the stories that are contained in the book. As the students gained in confidence, after working on vocabulary and retelling the stories, they wrote speech bubbles to focus on language development for writing their own plays. To focus on developing pronunciation, I used the chants from the book to start work on connected speech and, once they had written speech bubbles, we worked on thought groups (where are the pauses), what’s the most important word and intonation.
Writing and developing plays
We used the same format as the Hands Up! Project: Maximum 5 students, maximum 5 minutes.
In an attempt to balance language and performance strengths, I assigned students to the play writing groups.
I had had a chat with Nick beforehand, and I decided to use the same stimulus that was used for “Welcome to Earth” (another book of Palestinian students’ plays): you are aliens who have arrived on Earth from outer space. They considered the following questions:
What will you do? Where will you go? What can you see? Is it good or bad? Decide: Do you want to stay? Why/why not?
The class discussed possible topics and each group made their own decision. They then spent a number of sessions writing their plays together and each time I worked with them to help develop what they wanted to say.
Then they went through the same pronunciation development process as they had done with the existing plays in Stories Alive! They worked on pauses, sentence stress and intonation.
They practiced in class and tried to learn their lines before their performances.
Performances
We had 4 plays written and performed by the students:
1. Aysha and the Aliens
2. China
3. Visit to the Jungle
4. Miracle at Camperdown Festival
Evaluation
The students felt that the plays helped develop their language and pronunciation. They also thought that it was an interesting thing to do in class. The difficulties mentioned by students were that it was hard to learn their lines and that they didn’t have a lot of time (most of the students work and have families as well as attending college).
What I learned
Advantages of using a play in the classroom
Students used their own words
There was good team work
They were communicating and negotiating in English
There was a lot of repetition
It made the language memorable
It was very focused pronunciation work which was then used
It was a multi-skilled piece of work
The performance was very motivating
I was surprised at how the students, many of whom were people of few words in a class discussion, just went for it!
Difficulties
Some students found it difficult to learn the lines, even though they had written them
We probably needed more time for rehearsal without the written lines as the less confident students definitely delivered their lines with clearer pronunciation when they were using the written lines as a prompt
To conclude, I think it was a very good learning experience to use plays in the classroom in this way, for me as well as the students!
So, I’m glad I attended the plenary talk by Nick, I’ve been following the work of the Hands Up Project since and I continue to be inspired by the work that is being produced by Palestinian students with the support of their teachers. I hope I have another opportunity to use plays in my work with students in the future and maybe one day I will have time to be one of the amazing volunteers that work with the project.
Download your free PDF resource of Stories Alive! here:
