Reflections on a primary school teacher professional development programme on learning English through Process Drama

Abstract

This article documents the authors’ reflections on a teacher professional development programme conducted in 38 Hong Kong primary schools on the teaching of English through Process Drama. The authors draw upon the views of school principals, subject panel head teachers, English teachers, students and parents in focus group interviews to examine the learning and teaching experiences at the heart of the Programme. These reflections focus on how Process Drama can enhance second language acquisition by accommodating more affective factors in learning, by stressing creativity and by shifting the didactic discourse in the classroom to one that is more authentic and less threatening and which encourages increased amounts of student talk. The authors describe how, based on the focus group interview data, a piece of Verbatim Theatre was created and used as a stimulus to elicit deeper reflective responses to the Programme. They also reflect upon the level of understanding of Process Drama's complex pedagogy and artistry demonstrated by those teachers new to it and consider what further research might help the long-term implementation of drama in Hong Kong classrooms.

Keywords:

• Process Drama
• Second Language Acquisition
• Classroom discourse
• Teacher education

Notes

1. In this paper, the authors use SLA (Second Language Acquisition) as a term to include what other authors refer to as ESL (English as a Second Language) or EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learning.

2. These unit plans were of varied lengths of 4–12 lessons, and adopted Process Drama as the entire approach – to different degrees of success depending on the school teachers’ readiness and understanding of the form. Readers may refer to Language Alive (Chan and Lam 2010) for exemplars of these plans, which have been published as part of the Programme to provide teaching resources for Hong Kong English teachers.

3. All the interviews in this paper were conducted in the participants’ mother tongue (Cantonese). The extracts from interview transcripts quoted in this paper are the authors’ translations.

4. When the interviewees talk about ‘drama lessons’ in our interviews, they were referring to English lessons with use of drama.

5. All names in this article are pseudonyms.