Editorial from Mario
This piece was written in the early 80's and whether it was published somewhere at that time, a quarter of a century ago, is knowledge we no longer have.
To read more on psychodrama please look up the Following articles by Bernard Dufeu published in HLT: The fundamental Hypotheses of Language Psychodramaturgy, Sep 2002 Short Article, Bernard Dufeu replies to Svante Svensson May 2001 Readers Letters, A Look at a Way of Teaching based on Relationship Jan 2001 Major Article
Doubling - a Psychodrama Technique that has been successfully Transposed to Language Teaching
John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri
Menu
Introduction
Typical procedure
Doubling a picture
Doubling a group member
Linguistic doubling
Contradiction doubling
Two voice doubling
The communicative approach
References
This article does not deal with the major adaptation of psychodrama techniques to language teaching, Willy Urbain's and the Dufeus' Expression Spontanée.
[Author's note: over the past twenty years Bernard Dufeu has tended to refer to their work as "psychodramaturgie linguistique"] It deals with the applications that some of us at Pilgrims, Canterbury in the UK and elsewhere have found for a particular psychodrama technique: doubling. First the reader is given an insight into what doubling is in normal, therapeutic psychodrama. The writers then describe five adaptations of doubling to the F.L. classroom. The article ends with an attack on the shallowness of the communicative approach, as we are currently experiencing it in Europe.
Urbain and the Dufeus (Bernard and Marie) have, over the last ten years, created a complete method for teaching beginners based largely on ideas drawn from Moreno's psychodrama. Their complete system would be best described by them or those who have worked directly with them. On the other hand I must here admit my debt to Expression Spontanée, also known as Psychodramaturgie Linguistique, and in particular to Bernard Dufeu, as it was through him that I came in contact with psychodrama and its language teaching applications. [For a full description of Urbain and the Dufeus' work, see
"Wege zu einer Paedagogik des Seins", Dufeu, 2003 (self-published) "Teaching Myself", Dufeu, OUP, 1994 , "Sur les chemins d'une pedagogie de l'etre, Dufeu", (self-published, 1992. See also: www.psychodramaturgie.de)
The main body of this article will examine ways in which one psychodrama technique, doubling, has been adapted to teaching elementary to advanced ESL students. But before exploring the adaptation it is necessary to give you some idea of what a double is in ordinary psychodrama.
A psychodrama session will normally start with warm up exercises. There will then normally be a period of negotiation in which the group leader, or psychodramatist, picks someone in the group who is ready to work on one of his/ her personal problems. A kind of contract is established in the group that this person is to fill the centre of the stage for the next hour or two and to play the role of protagonist.
The group leader then asks the protagonist to state his/ her problem in a few sentences. The leader immediately moves the protagonist from this verbalising phase into a scene relevant to the problem. The protagonist has to pick members of the group to play roles in this scene, the roles of people significant in the protagonist's life. The scene then begins.
If the person cast, say as the protagonist's mother, does not know how to behave and what to say in this role, the group leader gets the protagonist and his/ her mother to switch roles for a sentence or two, so that the person playing the mother can have the role defined by the protagonist, the only person who knows. By fast use of role reversal all the actors in the protagonist's scene get to know their parts. At certain moments during a scene the group leader may well realize that the protagonist is not able to bring out all she/ he needs too, is blocking or is unable to verbalise feelings that are welling up; at this point the leader will designate a double to come and speak for and through the protagonist. Schützenberger gives this description of the double's job:
From a technical point of view the double stands or sits to one side of and a little bit behind the protagonist, A. The double, B, puts into words the feelings she/he is aware of in the protagonist, A, or that she/ he guesses to be there, and which the protagonist fails to express, out of shyness, inhibition, pain, guilt, aggression, politeness….or because she/ he is unaware of feeling them or doesn't know how to put them into words. The double's job is to give form to and to make conscious to the protagonist his/ her preconscious feelings, and, if need be, help the psycho dramatist to guide the protagonist onto a path that seems useful.
In a psychodrama session the double may be one of the leader's professionally trained assistants or may be drawn from the group. The protagonist has the full right to disown and repudiate the double's verbalisations at any time.
The above gives you some idea of the meaning of the word double in Moreno's psychotherapeutic work. Now it is clear that the language teacher is not a psychodramatist and that his/ her contract with the students does not warrant the teacher taking on a therapist's role. This needs to be said loud and clear. On the other hand some of the communicational techniques from psychodrama can very profitably be borrowed. What follows is an outline of how some of our colleagues in Pilgrims, Canterbury, UK, and others have used the doubling technique.
Choose a large picture that everybody in the group is going to be able to see clearly. The best kind of picture is the close up of a head. The gnarled and wrinkled features of a very old person work powerfully in the exercise, especially if the picture leaves their sex ambiguous.
Show your class the picture and ask them to sit back and relax as you formulate a whole number of "I wonder" statements about the picture e. g.
I wonder how old the person is
I wonder if they're married
I wonder what kind of house they live in etc…
Now tell the class they are going to be able to address questions directly to the picture person. Ask them to each write down ten questions. As they write go round and help with language and correct mistakes.
Ask for a volunteer to come and double the picture - that is to come and sit below or next to the picture and answer the questions as the picture person. The students fire their questions at the picture and the double builds up a characterisation answering in the first person as the picture person.
If the picture is of a well known person the exercise is very different from when the visual "protagonist" is unknown. In the latter case the double works much more by empathy, projection, and reaction to the questioners' feelings. If everybody knows the subject of the picture then the double tries to draw on a corpus of memorised information.
This exercise can well serve as a lead- in to extensive reading, if you use the dust jacket close up of the author of a novel as your picture, and the ask the students to have a look at the novel. We have tried this with Oriana Fallaci's A Man.
This exercise is best done with the teacher as the protagonist the first time.
Propose that the students write ten or so questions they would like to put to you, and make clear that they can go well beyond trivialities like "What is your hobby?" As they write, go round and act as a language resource, supplying words and helping with things people are unsure of. You should also write ten questions addressed to yourself.
Choose a panel of people you would like to have doubling you. Have them sit behind you in a shallow crescent, facing the group. Give their questions and yours to other class members. Now invite the group to fire their questions.
These are answered first by the doubles behind you - you then assent or correct what they have said.
The group member doubling exercise can be repeated several times during a course with different people as protagonists.
The protagonist should always have the right to choose his/ her doubles.
Every stage of the exercise arouses interest and maintains a reasonable level of creative tension. While writing the questions initially students are engaged in a sifting activity: many more questions will occur to them than actually go down on the paper in front of them.
There is choice going on too when students have to decide which of their own or their classmates' questions to ask - there is motivated listening happening when people witness different doublings and the protagonist's response to them and to the original question. Lots of supplementary questions get asked.
The group member doubling exercise is one that it is only sensible to do once a group has already achieved some degree of mutual trust.
Supposing one group member is about to tell the whole group a story. Ask the teller to choose someone in the group to come and sit behind him/ her and tactfully help him/ her with the language. The double's function is to help supply words the teller can't find and to gently correct major mistakes the teller makes, especially if they are communication blocking ones.
It is vital that the teller should choose his/ her own double and that the criteria of choice should be left up to him/ her.
Sometimes a student will choose a person who is linguistically better than them, sometimes a person they get on well with.
Having a linguistic double sitting behind the teller of the story makes the group listen quite differently. Even if the double intervenes little, the group listens with greater linguistic awareness.
It is vital in this activity that the heavy booted teacher should stay strictly out of the action - if the teacher hovers ready to correct mistakes then she/ he usurps the role of the double and hopelessly upstages him/ her. This is a time for the teacher to observe the group and take no apparent active part.
This exercise works best with post-beginner to lower intermediate students. The teacher presents the group with a tabletop full of pictures and asks each participant to choose one picture she/ he really likes and one she/ he really dislikes.
The teacher then goes round behind a given student and starts doubling him/ her, explaining in the first person why "I like this picture and dislike that one". It is made clear to the student that she/ he may shut the teacher up at any time if she is not expressing the student's feelings about the two pictures. The student then expresses his/ her own feelings as an expansion, correction or contradiction of what the teacher has said while doubling. The doubling, however, has supplied the protagonist student and the group with much of the language necessary to talk about attitudes to the two pictures chosen. The teacher has had her tape recorder recording during the doubling and the protagonist's speech and so can get the group to do detailed analytical work on the tape at a later stage.
[ Author's note: Baudains is currently DOS at the British School, Trieste]
Get the students sitting in threes with the protagonist slightly in front of the other two. The other two, the voices, must each have access to one of the protagonist's ears, but must not have eye-contact with him/ her.
Addressing yourself to the protagonists in each threesome, lead them in a gentle guided fantasy in which they take off from New York, overfly the Atlantic, and then the Sahara.
Bring them down to land in an African country where people are threatened with starvation from drought. Let them know that they are the head of a UN famine relief programme. As they step out of the aircraft let them meet the Minister of the Interior of this country, a general, and propose to him that he forego the 25% of the famine aid that he demands as his" share".
The general is adamant that without this greasing of his palm, he will make their relief work impossible.
At this point bring the group out of the guided fantasy and tell the voices that the right hand one is to try to persuade his/ her protagonist to accept the general's offer, while the left hand one is to oppose acceptance. Tell the voices they do not have to take turns in getting the protagonist's attention, they may speak to him/ her simultaneously if they wish. Tell the voices they have five minutes to persuade their protagonist.
At this moment the pensive atmosphere of the room erupts into animated whispering, as the voice students put their points to their bewildered protagonists' ears.
After five minutes ask the voices to be silent and allow the protagonists 30 seconds of thinking time to make their decisions in. Each protagonist then announces his/ her decision to the group.
(Above we have given an example of a particular dilemma to be struggled with and solved by the protagonist. Any other dilemma would do in terms of making the exercise work.)
This last technique is furthest from psychodrama doubling as the voices are expressing two moral/political/pragmatic positions rather than trying to empathise with the feelings and mode of being of the protagonist at that particular moment and furthermore the protagonist him/ herself is role-playing rather being in his/ her own skin.
Some readers who have got this far must be wondering why we and our colleagues should go sifting through therapy techniques for things to do in the language classroom. This is a question that properly deserves answering.
Most of the materials being produced in Britain and Europe at the moment [ Editorial note:1980's] have the ESL student working on third person activities. The student is asked to listen to a dialogue and then pick out what third persons are saying on the tape.
The student has no I - thou involvement, which makes the class work trivial and boring, most of the time. A great deal of the work in UK ESL classrooms focuses on material the teacher brings in from outside and very little time is allowed for the students to contribute from their own internal stock of knowledge, experiences and emotions.
In this area the therapies are way ahead of us language instructors. By taking over and modifying their techniques we can give our language instruction a reasonable degree of depth which in Europe, at any rate, is still mostly lacking from the so-called communicative approach, the movement triggered by Wilkins ten years ago [ Editorial note: mid 70's]. The expounders of the communicative approach are still crowing over marvellous discoveries like the information gap, which is the realisation that to communicate, usually, speaker A has to know and wish to divulge something that B doesn't know.
An information gap exercise might have two students with very similar pictures, hidden from each other, trying to find what the differences between their two pictures are.
This sort of exercise is fine as far as it goes but it remains a very superficial way of using language, a way that touches the affective make-up of the learner almost not at all.
If language is to be unconsciously internalised then the learners must live through experiences in it that make it valuable as a medium. The value of the target language as a medium in the mind of the learner, depends directly on the value of the messages she/he receives and transmits through it. In other words, if, in the language class, the student learns something new about him/ herself and about other group members through the target language, then there is a good chance that the student's subconscious mind will start taking the target language seriously, which is very often not the case in the foreign language classroom.
In Modern Greek Mario is an intermediate speaker, having learnt the language in his early twenties. But of one word of Modern Greek he is a native speaker. The work, toketo, means child-birth, delivery, and his first adult, conscious exposure to this event was in a Greek language setting. The word was burnt into his brain over a long, horrific, beautiful night.
This word, at least, Mario has learnt in its full depth.
While we cannot ask the classroom to provide situations of this depth, we can offer our students language practice situations that accept them as affective, whole person learners rather than as cognitive kippers. There is infinitely more to learning a language than intellectually mastering a phonological and structural system.
I would suggest that the doubling exercises presented above provide middle-depth involvement for students and avoids the triviality of much language work, but do not trespass too far into the student's intimacy or break the implicit contract of the teaching situation, guilefully transforming it into a therapy contract.
Blatner, Howard A. 1973 Acting-in-Practical Applications of Psychodrama Methods. Springer Publishing Company.
Jennings, Sue. 1973 Remedial Drama, Pitman and Sons.
Moreno, J.L. 1977 Psychodrama. Beacon House Inc.
Schutzenberger-Ancelin, Anne. 1970 Precis de Psychodrama- Introduction aux aspects techniques. Editions Universitaires.
Starr. 1977 Psychodrama- Rehearsal for Living. Nelson Hall
Please check the Drama Course course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Expert Teacher course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Skills of Teacher Training course at Pilgrims website.
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