The Drama Book: Lesson Plans, Activities, and Scripts for English-Language Learners: Teacher Tools, #6

More Theater and Drama Resources from Alphabet Publishing

Short Plays

Short plays that take about 15 minutes to perform. Each script focuses on a particular pragmatics point and includes vocabulary and pragmatics activities, as well as extensive suggestions for rehearsing and performing. These work great for a drama class or a short theater module and are adaptable to a variety of levels.

Just Desserts: A foodie drama about a chef gone bad

Introducing Rob: Lola's family loves her new boyfriend. Until they actually meet him

Colorado Ghost Story: Two exchange students get into trouble in the old West

Strange Medicine: Who decides what the truth is?

ISTD Coursebooks

The Integrated Skills Through Drama coursebooks contain a complete curriculum built around an original one-act play. Each play is accompanied by background readings, vocabulary and pragmatics exercises, writing, pronunciation activities, and more support. Instructions on producing a play fill out the text, which can be used as an elective or module in an oral skill class. Aimed at intermediate learners, teenagers and older.

Her Own Worst Enemy: A serious comedy about choosing a major

Only the Best Intentions: A love triangle between a guy a girl and a game

Rising Water: A stormy drama about what happens to people in a crisis

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Visit www.alphabetpublishingbooks.com/scripts to learn more and download free previews.

ISBN:  978-1-948492-32-4 (print)

978-1-948492-45-4 (ebook)

Copyright 2019 Alice Savage

All rights reserved.

This is not a photocopiable book, except where indicated. Our authors, editors, and designers work hard to develop original, high-quality content. They deserve compensation. Please respect their efforts and their rights under copyright law.

Do not copy, photocopy, or reproduce this book or any part of this book (unless the page is marked PHOTOCOPIABLE) for use inside or outside the classroom, in commercial or non-commercial settings. It is also forbidden to copy, adapt, or reuse this book or any part of this book for use on websites, blogs, or third-party lesson-sharing websites.

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Discounts on class sets and bulk orders available upon inquiry.

Edited by Walton Burns

Cover and Print Interior Design by Annabel Brandon

Ebook formatting by Red Panda Editorial Services

Incidental images by Tasmin Ward

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to extend a special thanks to a few extraordinary people who supported me throughout this adventure in Drama and ELT. I am more grateful than you probably realize!

Macarena Aguilar

Walton Burns

David Farmer

Steve Hirschhorn

Alice Llanos

David Olsher

Kaveh Shafiei

Cyrus Shafiei

David Skolnick

Amy Tate

Trish Ueda

Margi Wald

Colin Ward

Sherry Ward

Jodie Whitehurst

Ken Wilson

I put words in their mouths. It is this, more than anything else that distinguishes what I do as a playwright and screenwriter from the work of the novelist, or the poet, or the short story writer. They write their words primarily to be read. I write mine primarily, to be said and heard.

—Andrew Bovell

ANNOTATED CONTENTS

Foreword by Ken Wilson

Introduction

Part One: Activities

Theater games, warmers, fillers

Stand-alone drama activities can be used to build community while developing speaking, listening, and nonverbal communication skills.

Pronunciation activities

Focused pronunciation work includes strategies that students can use to prepare a script or transfer to other public speaking tasks.

Moving into monologues

Short one-speaker performances provide an introduction to acting and are a perfect vehicle for working on pronunciation skills and strategies.

Role-plays, simulations and improvisation

Structured and spontaneous practice supports functional language practice in different contexts and helps students develop fluency.

Sketches and pragmatics

Single-scene sketches open a window into the hidden language of pragmatics and allow students to experience English conversational tactics from within.

Reader’s Theater and podcasts

Performing a prose poem, text, or play with a script in hand bridges language work and drama. This section also has example activities for using a play to practice selected grammar structures

Producing plays

Staging a production provides literary content for discussion, fluency practice through the rehearsal process, and the impetus for focused pronunciation and intonation work.

Writing original material

Workshopping and writing a play supports students in writing skills, fluency practice, exploring theatrical themes, and bringing their own stories to the stage.

Working with academic content

Taking on the roles of history, science, or other fields through process drama–or perhaps making a documentary or podcast–gives students a kinesthetic and empathetic experience with academic content.

Assessing and giving feedback

Giving notes, using rubrics, and encouraging self-assessment all support students in valuing language production skills such as pronunciation, pragmatics, and fluency.

Part One: Activities

Monologues

Chain Migration

Five monologues provide different perspectives of people coming to live with relatives in a new country.

The Harvey Monologues

Ten voices representing victims and their rescuers during the historic Houston flood of 2017.

Strangers on a Plane

The interior dialog of four passengers and a flight attendant reveal a slice-of-life at 30,000 miles above the earth.

Sketches

These single-scene interactions explore how personality intersects with social convention to shape a conversation.

You’re Making Me Crazy

Five microsketches  explore ways that people attempt to influence someone else’s response including a confession, an offer, a secret, a favor, and an apology.

Fake It till You Make It

A visiting debate team is terrified by the driving skills of the young man who picks them up at the airport.

The Smartest Kid in the Room

Some people are much better at getting others to do their work than they are at doing the work itself.

What Are Friends For?

Sometimes a socially adventurous friend can be useful.

The Wrong Foot

Making the wrong assumption about someone can lead to a big embarrassment.

A Reader’s Theater Script

Suspicious is a 14-character drama that includes implied action. It can be used in reader’s theater or as fully-staged play. The drama looks at a clash of ambitions following the fall of a large meteorite in a desert community over 10 scenes. 

A Short Play

Strange Medicine is a 5-character drama that explores different attitudes toward scientific inquiry and allows students to interpret and develop characters who are changed by the events in the story.

Appendices

Stress Express

Stress Emphasis

Character Development Worksheet

Academy Awards Certificate

Process Drama Background Reading

Audition Rubric

Feedback rubric without points

Feedback rubric with points

Self-assessment

Theater vocabulary

Additional Drama Resources

Bibliography

About the Author

FOREWORD

I got involved in drama for English learners pretty much by accident. In the early 1970s, I was working as a teacher at International House, a private language school in London England with branches all over the world. The principal of the school, John Haycraft, was always interested in finding new ways to excite and inspire English students, so it was no surprise when he encouraged a theater group at the school. It was called the English Teaching Theater (ETT) and for a number of years, actors and teachers put on a stage-show for learners of English in London during the summer.

Then in early 1973, John made it possible for some of us to take the show on tour to Germany. It was a sensational success. We thought that the tour would be a one-off, but the ETT established itself as a traveling company, touring the world for nearly 30 years and visiting 55 different countries. While the company eventually closed in the early 2000s, its popularity showed that theater has much to offer the language classroom.

We realised that there was much more we could do for students than simply perform on stage. The audiences were always enthusiastic, but it was clear that we needed to find ways to incorporate drama and play-related activities into classroom teaching. And over the years, this has started to happen. Drama activities have become a way to enliven classrooms by getting students out of their seats and interacting with each other in both playful and sometimes serious ways.

We were not the first people to do this but I like to think that we encouraged many teachers to see the possibility of doing something similar, either related to scripts or working with more improvisational activities.

I was therefore extremely pleased to see this new book by Alice, which brings recent developments in ELT drama together in one compact volume. It provides a useful overview of different approaches as well as specific activities for working on everything from pronunciation and grammar to understanding characters and conflict.

Humans do not always behave in expected ways, and Alice’s sketches and short plays show how motivations such as longing, fear, and audacity can get people into and out of trouble. The truth is that people make mistakes, they don’t always say what they mean, and occasionally someone is not who they appear to be. How people deal with these tricky situations is the stuff of plays, which can be examined, discussed, and performed in the language classroom.

Those of us in theatre know that something magical happens when people collaborate in the creation of another world. Whether this is done as a spontaneous improvisation or the production of a play, the experience is highly motivating and fosters confidence, fluency, and fun.  I would highly encourage teachers who want to try out theatre, whether at the start of your career or as a way to refresh your practice, to keep this book at hand.

Ken Wilson

London, England

2019

​INTRODUCTION

The first time I did drama with English learners, I was a dead body.

I had decided I shouldn’t have any lines, so I became the victim in a Halloween-themed vampire play. I lay on the teacher’s desk while a vampire mother and father argued with their son about drinking my blood before he went to school.

But I don’t want to drink blood, he said.

You have to, said the mother. Everyone does.

But I don’t want to kill people and drink blood. I want to be good!

Oh, pish tosh, said the father, What else would you drink?

Orange juice, said the young protagonist.

I still remember this interaction even though it happened nearly 30 years ago. In fact, I could probably even point out the classroom if I went back to the university where I taught my first ESL (English as a Second Language) classes.

Such drama experiences are memorable because they represent a collaborative effort to create a different reality. Students who take on roles experiment with using language to present themselves in new identities. Their goals can be playful, intimate, urgent or serious, and the process of trying to achieve them creates suspense but also curiosity. Where will a specific language choice lead a character? What do people actually say in high stakes interactions? Is it better to threaten or bargain? What does a story about a rebellious young vampire reveal about the premise Parents always know best?

Theater allows us to explore and construct cultural understandings inside and outside our culture. It can be especially valuable for language learners because, unlike text meant for a reader, dialog reveals the back-and-forth dynamics of how culture plays out in conversation. Playwrights tell stories through what characters say, and their craft involves revealing the implicit strategies that people use when they are trying to navigate both a relationship and a goal. This is pragmatics, and it is an essential skill for language learners.

In supporting the use of drama in the language classroom, Astrid Mei-Yi Cheng and Joe Winston put it this way,

Pedagogical resources that contain cultural capital are crucial for ESL learners who may be expected to use English in international settings where the kind of cultural knowledge shared by English-speaking communities is implicitly valued. Without this knowledge, they must always be perceived as less competent, more ‘foreign’, no matter how correct their grammar and how impressive their functional language use might be.​[1]

In other words, imagine you are chatting with someone and after a bit, you say, Well, I’m so glad I ran into you! Depending on your tone and gesture, many native speakers of English will interpret this statement as a signal that you want to close down the conversation. But a non-native speaker won’t necessarily catch the implicit meaning, creating a potentially awkward situation.

Plays are full of this kind of signaling of intentions. Modern plays in particular are chock-full of high-frequency lexical chunks that people use to make moves and negotiate turns and topics. Written dialog also provides opportunities to work on pronunciation strategies and features such as linking and reductions. In fact, there’s no need to alter your average script to feature reductions and linking because they occur naturally. For example, the high-frequency utterance, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her? has several of these elements (I dunno. Why donchewasker?) but is not likely to appear in a text, particularly an academic text.

When students gain a window into pragmatics, they tend to immediately sense its value in social interactions. Here’s a quote from a student who was in one of my theater classes:

The play helped me to learn different kinds of pragmatics. Depending on the pragmatic I want to express, I know what kind of expressions to use for it. For a foreign person for whom English it is not the first language, that is help me more to have a fluent conversation with other people. 

—Fabienne Rene

Plays thus include useful linguistic as well as literary content. They provide scaffolding through which students can try out roles, voices, and behaviors, ultimately deciding for themselves what they want to keep and how they want to use it. When paired with role-plays, improvisations, and simulations, students can transfer language and knowledge to new situations. We can also add the fluency practice that is an integral component of the discussion and rehearsal process.

Finally, the experience of participating in a play can also inform original work. Students in a drama class or module can move from improvisations to workshopping an idea into their own play. In addition, process drama is a method of using the devices of theater to bring a world to life simply for the actors’ experience. There is no performance for an audience, but there is an embodied experience of a literary, historical, or other premise.

In my experience, playing drama games, producing plays, improvising scenes and embodying learning in myriad other ways has a cumulative effect of building confidence and something I can only describe as personality. I’ve watched students take on more agency in how they come across to others and ultimately to take pleasure in spontaneous conversations. When it goes well, it is as if a barrier has come down and the classroom participants can finally and authentically know each other as people.

From Baby Steps to Giant Leaps

A major aim of this book is to build bridges between the ELT drama community and teachers who would like to try drama but aren’t sure about how to get started. For this reason, Part one offers drama activities and lesson plan options, while Part two provides dramatic monologues and scripts. While the activities can be matched to support rehearsals and development of the scripts, they do not have to be. You can use them as is, adapt them, or mix and match them to suit any monologue or play, even one that you or the students write yourselves. After all, drama is a creative and collaborative endeavor, so no book can anticipate the unique circumstances of a classroom.

One of the most important elements for a theater class or module is a sense of community and trust. Learners need to feel comfortable using their voice and gesture to convey emotions and intentions. Consequently, the first section contains a collection of drama games and icebreakers that can foster community while working on language awareness, acting, and social skills. You might note a few popular familiar theater games that have been tweaked to strengthen a pronunciation or vocabulary component, as well as new ideas.

The second section focuses pronunciation and prosody. These activities are also quite engaging, so they can also work as icebreakers. However, plays are a natural way to practice pronunciation, and pronunciation work is needed to ensure the play is intelligible.

The next section moves on to monologues, which are short one-character texts to be delivered directly to the audience. These can provide models of spoken language that is different from that of a speech in that they involve emotions, implicit meanings, and informal phrasings and