The Play’s the Thing

Nick Bilbrough, UK

Nick Bilbrough has been involved in language teaching for over twenty-five years, and has taught in a wide range of interesting and challenging contexts. He is the author of two resource books in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series: Dialogue Activities (2007) and Memory Activities for Language Learning (2011), as well as Stories Alive, a free resource book of story based activities for young learners, published by British Council Palestine. https://handsup4.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/stories-alive-story-based-activities-for-young-learners.pdf. He now works part time in London at the Sharek centre http://sharekcentre.com/, in the training of teachers of Arabic, but most of his time and energy is now devoted to the registered charity he established, The Hands Up Project https://handsupproject.org/ – teaching English through online storytelling and drama to disadvantaged children in Palestine, Jordan and Pakistan.

Menu

Introduction
Learning through plays
The language learning benefits of acting in a play
Classroom activities
From script to performance
Script interpretation
From story to script
The audience
References

Introduction

In September 2015 the United Nations announced a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), focussing on issues related to world poverty, the environment and ensuring prosperity for all. Each goal has specific targets to be achieved before 2030 by Governments, by organisations and by individuals. For more information please see www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ Sustainable Development Goal 10 is focussed on reducing inequality within and between countries. There are many parts of our very unequal and divided world which this goal could apply to. In this article I would like to focus initially on just one such area – Gaza, and then to suggest that the rehearsal, performance and creation of simple play scripts with children living in places with similar levels of poverty, oppression and lack of opportunity is one way to begin to address this goal.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with 1.76 million people, more than 70% of whom are classed by the UN as refugees, crammed into a tiny area of land, smaller than the Isle of Wight. Unemployment has reached unprecedented levels, and the vast majority of its citizens are dependent on international assistance. The ten-year blockade on Gaza means that movement in and out by people and goods is very tightly controlled, and there are shortages of clean drinking water and other basic necessities. In the most recent (2014) bombardment and invasion by Israel, 2251 Gazans lost their lives – and 551 of these were children.

In such challenging circumstances, where feelings of abandonment and isolation are common, opportunities to use and learn English through online connections with the outside world can provide something of a lifeline. For the past two years, The Hands Up Project has worked with groups of children in Gaza providing English classes through storytelling and drama activities using simple video conferencing tools. It started as a format to provide these children with more exposure to English through storytelling, but because of the children’s desire to interact, to perform and to share stories with the outside world, is now increasingly becoming a vehicle for the children’s online performances of simple plays internationally. These performances result in empowerment for the actors and raised awareness for the audience, and this in turn may lead to reduced inequality.

Learning through plays

Plays have been used for centuries as a way to highlight issues of injustice and to explore, even transform, the realities of those who are oppressed. In sixteenth century London, teachers like Jacques Bellot, with his Familiar Dialogues (1586) used scripts of everyday conversations to teach English to Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution in mainland Europe. At the same time as having a language learning aim, the dialogue also provided a framework by which common concerns were raised.

Later, in the New South Wales penal colony in 18th Century Australia, the governor, Arthur Philip, a man who seemed to have some sympathy for the convicts who had been transported there (mostly for very minor offences) decided to put on a performance of the play, ‘The Recruiting officer’ with the convicts as actors. Though it was not second language learners who were taking part, it seems that language development was still Philip’s main aim with the production of the play.

“The theatre is an expression of civilization. We belong to a great country,
which has spawned great playwrights: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson... the
convicts will be speaking a refined, literate language and expressing
sentiments of a delicacy they are not used to.”

In fact, according to Wertenbaker (1988), rehearsing and performing the play was a learning experience for the convicts; not in the behaviouristic way expressed above by Philip, but rather by the way it empowered the actors to become a community of practice and gave them a voice, where previously they had been voiceless and disjointed.

More recently the work of practitioners like Augusto Boal have explored ways to use plays to raise awareness of social issues. In his Forum theatre (1992), the lines are blurred between actors and those watching, and the audience, or ‘spect-actors’ as Boal refers to them, are invited to shout ‘Stop’ and take the part of those acting if they can see a more appropriate way to deal with the situation being presented.

A teacher in Nepal, Gobinda Puri, develops this idea by helping the teenage learners he works with to create their own plays based around social issues in their context. Here’s a short extract (personal correspondence) from a play created by a group working with the issue of child marriage.

Father: Sit here. (He pulls the cushion close and asks her to sit there.) Tshomo, you are grown-up now and moreover, you are female. Today we received Gyalpo’s brothers who came here for your marriage with Gyalpo. Nanu, you have to marry him for our prestige. We have already decided.

Tshomo: Papa… I can't. (She cries and runs out of the room… her mother follows her to comfort her. There's a brief silence.)

Shakespeare also emphasised this role of the play to draw attention to a particular issue when Hamlet spoke these immortal lines:-

Hamlet: I'll have grounds
More relative than this—the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.
(Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 603–605)

Like Boal, Hamlet too was thinking about the power of the play from the perspective of the audience, rather than that of the actors. He decided to put on, ‘The murder of Gonzago’ (the play within the play in Hamlet) because the plot had similarities with the actual murder of his father. Suspecting that his uncle, Claudius, was guilty of the murder, he wanted to observe Claudius watching the play to see if he could detect his conscience being stirred.

Of course, if we put on a play with learners of English as a foreign language, we’re focussing principally on how the participants can benefit from the experience rather than the audience. As the acclaimed drama in education expert, Dorothy Heathcote, put it (Wagner 1999), ‘The difference between theatre and classroom drama is that in theatre everything is contrived so that the audience gets the kicks. In the classroom, the participants get the kicks.’ So what kind of kicks can second language learners get from rehearsing and performing a play?

The language learning benefits of acting in a play

Play scripts are ready-made coherent and cohesive texts, where language is used meaningfully and in context. In the script for ‘Juha and the meat’, for example, grammar, vocabulary and chunks of language related to the theme of food occur naturally, and in relation to each other (I’d like a.., shopkeeper, spices, delicious etc). Research into language retention (see for example Folse 2004) suggests that language presented in this way is more memorable than in cases where lots of examples of words within the same lexical set are presented together (colours or adjectives to describe people etc) The latter way is of course how language tends to be presented in most coursebooks.

Although most learners prioritise being able to speak over being able to write in a language, it’s notoriously difficult for learners to notice the features of spoken language. Whereas written language can be accessed in the time frame of the reader, the listener has no such control over speech; once words have been spoken, unless they are recorded in some way, they simply disappear. Scripts are effectively spoken language written down, and therefore provide the best of both worlds.

Of course, we express ourselves and our ideas not just through the words that we use. Communication is an embodied experience (Thornbury 2013) and we also create meanings with facial expressions, with gestures and with physical movements. When performing a play it’s important to include all of these features, alongside and in conjunction with language, in order to make the play realistic. Incorporating physicality helps us to remember the lines for performing the play, but it also helps the language to stick in long term memory long after the play has taken place.

It’s not what you say it’s the way that you say it! A lot of meaning is carried through pronunciation, but it’s hard to get this point across to learners when spoken language is practised in isolation, and without a wider context. When practising the lines of a play, as teachers we can discuss with the learners different ways of saying the lines and the impact that this has. More importantly they can feel it themselves through other people’s reactions to what they say.

Practising and performing a play provides the perfect combination of very controlled and very free language use. Learning the lines involves lots of repetition of a model of natural English, but at the same time there is the potential for plenty of freer discussion around how to say the lines, how to block the scene, the use of costumes etc. Both of these types of language use can help to develop fluency. As well as this it can be very useful to involve an element of improvisation in to the process of learning lines itself. If the script is sometimes taken away and learners improvise using whatever language they have available to them it helps them to both remember the lines and to personalise them.

In order to learn any new word, chunk of language or grammatical structure, learners need to practice it lots of times. A few hours of English a week isn’t really enough time for this practice to be effective, so learners need to take it away with them and do it in their own time. As teachers we want them to be turning new language over in their minds at any opportune moment. Getting ready to perform a play can provide the level of practice needed in a much more meaningful way than the coursebook can usually offer – not just practice for the sake of it, but practice to make the most accomplished performance possible.

Sometimes in ELT methodology we tend to shy away from the idea of performance. We avoid putting learners on the spot and incorporate lots of pair and group work so that learners feel safe and unthreatened. This is all very well and can certainly help to build learners confidence, but so too can incorporating a performance stage in my opinion. There is a big difference of course between performing something when you are unprepared, and performing when you’ve got to the point where you feel comfortable about what you are doing. For many learners it is the performance stage which provides the push they need in order to make real progress.

The following activities put these ideas into practice. Though some of them draw on the material in the British Council free publication Stories Alive www.britishcouncil.ps/en/programmes/education/stories, they could work with any simple story or play script, and with young learners in many different contexts.

Classroom activities

From script to performance

From script to performance

Aim: Students are provided with a simple framework in which to act in English

Language Focus: Enabling personalized and motivating reading and speaking practice

SDG: Developing ownership of a script through personalization and physicalisation

Creative focus: Students interact with written text by creating personalized representations of it.

Level: A1 plus (depending on the level of the script chosen)

Age: 10+

Preparation: Make enough copies of the chosen play script so that there is at least one for every two students

Procedure:

1. Give out copies of the chosen playscript. For lower level learners it probably works better if you use a story that they already know, or have heard you tell.
2. Invite some students up to the front of the class, one for each of the characters and narrators in the chosen script, and ask them to stand in a line facing the class, with one narrator at each end.
3. Ask them to read aloud the lines that are assigned to their character, and to incorporate simple actions to go with them. Work through the whole script in this way in front of the class, bringing up issues to discuss as they arise. Some key issues to raise in this discussion are as follows:

• When performing, the actors are not expected to have learnt their lines off by heart (although with sufficient practice this can happen) and may have their scripts to read aloud from.
• Actions are hinted at rather than expressed naturalistically. For instance if the narrator says that a character ‘runs up the hill’, the actor would perhaps run a few steps on the spot.
• It is clearer if everyone says their lines out, facing the audience, even if they are talking to a character who is by their side.
• Readers’ theatre works best when actions happen after they have been narrated, rather than at the same time. Here’s an example from the script for “Nasreddin and the dinner party’:

Narrator 1: Once upon a time, Nasreddin was working hard in the fields.
(The student playing Nasreddin mimes working in the field)
Narrator 2: It was a hot day and he was tired and hungry and thirsty.
(Nasreddin does some simple actions to show these things before saying his line)
Nasreddin: My back hurts. My feet hurt. My head hurts. My eyes hurt. Everything hurts!
(After saying each sentence the actor touches the relevant part of his body)

Follow up: After taking part in, or watching this, in plenary, students can prepare their own interpretation of the same script in groups and then take it in turns to perform them in front of the class. It doesn’t matter if there aren’t exactly the right number of students in each group. A useful creative challenge is to work out how they can still involve everyone when there are too few or too many people. Alternatively each group could be given a different script to work with and to perform. This way the performances may be more motivating to watch.

Students can also be asked to learn the scripts by heart for homework. A good way for them to do this if one person can see the script and the others cannot. The person with the script acts as a prompt and helps them if they forget by supplying the next word.

When students have worked with a few of these scripts, a nice group work task is to ask them to create their own scripts in the same style for stories that they know. Again these can then be performed in front of the whole class.

Additional resources: Recordings of learners in Palestine performing the scripts from Stories Alive can be accessed here.

The tortoise and the hare: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOfA5H3jJPM
The lion and the mouse: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1fEhOp3Thc
Juha and the meat: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuv7IRxQJL4
Juha and the donkey: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4TRhwUFSTI
Nasreddin and the dinner party: www.youtube.com/watch?v=STRGQeIBYiU
Jbene: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iihCXI3k_U
The farmer who followed his dream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEoYhJ4MXLY

Materials: This activity works well with any of the story scripts from the Stories Alive material. There are also free Readers’ theatre scripts available at www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm though some of these may need adapting for learners of English as a foreign language.

Aim: Students read a play script and then use a variety of strategies for interpreting what they have read

Language Focus: Providing personalized and motivating reading and speaking practice

SDG: Developing ownership of the script through personalization

Creative focus: Emphasising that listening and reading are creative processes.

Level: A1 plus (depending on the level of the script chosen)

Age: 10+

Preparation: Make enough copies of the chosen play script so that there is a at least one for every two students

Procedure:

1) After telling a traditional story to the class, and/or working with the script (see above) give out copies of the playscript.

The following activities are not meant to be done in sequence. They are simply suggestions for different interpretation activities.

Ask the students to discuss in groups how they imagined certain characters in the story. What did they look like? How old were they? How were they dressed? etc. Invite a few people to share what they imagined with the whole class. It is interesting how varied these interpretations can be.

Ask everyone to draw a picture of one of the key moments from the story. Emphasise that their drawings don’t need to be works of art and should be done fairly quickly. Go round the class while they are doing this, and discuss with the students what they have drawn. Some of the class could be invited to the front to show their drawings to everyone and talk about them with the teacher.

Here’s an example, from the story ‘Juha and the meat’ drawn by 12 year old Tawfeeq, in the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza.

Ask the students to pick a key moment from the story that they could represent through a still image. Demonstrate this by asking a few people to come to the front and shaping them into an image for your own key moment. Ask the others to interpret what they see. Each group of learners now discusses how they will represent their own still image and, if space allows, practices it. Ask each group to come to the front and show their still image to the rest of the class. Invite interpretations from the class. The teacher’s questions play an important role here in shaping the discourse (What is happening? Where are they? How does this person feel? What’s going to happen next? etc) If a camera is available it may be very useful to take a photo of each group’s still image. These can be shown to the students in a later class for reflection and comments. Can they remember what the still image represents, and the language that was used to describe it?

Ask one of the students to come up to the front and sit on a chair facing the class. Choose a character from the story for that person to become. Now invite the rest of the class to ask questions to the person at the front. He or she should answer as if they are that character. Using the traditional Middle-Eastern story of ‘Juha and the meat’ as an example, here are some possible questions that could be asked. They could be simple and fairly factual like the following..

Where do you live?
What’s your job?
How long have you been married? Etc

Or they could be more complex and require more creativity and interpretation on the part of the students, like these..

Why were you late home?
Do you have a good relationship with your neighbours?
Why didn’t you cook the meat yourself? etc

Additional resources: The idea of asking students to share their own representations of key moments from a story can work well with a vast range of different students, even at very low levels. In these recordings done through videoconferencing tools to the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees, the children are taking it in turns to come up to the webcam and show their pictures, or mime an action from a story they have heard me tell. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI4dMlejfsg www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bieq0TdJzYE

Materials: This activity works well with any of the story scripts from the Stories Alive material, but could also be used with pretty much any written script or story.

From story to script

Aim: Students listen to a story and then create a play script out of it.

Language Focus: Providing personalized and memorable listening, speaking and writing practice

SDG: Making language learning relevant for the students by telling stories which are clearly situated in the context in which they live. Empowering students to acknowledge and respect their own cultural heritage through storytelling and story making.

Creative focus: Stimulating imagination and the creation of mental imagery through storytelling. Providing a motivating context for creative writing.

Level: Any

Age: 10 plus

Procedure:

1. Tell the story to the class, using your best storytelling voice. Telling a story to a group of people is the most natural thing in the world: there is no great mystique about it. When telling a story to language learners however, there are a few key points to bear in mind which can help to make things go smoothly:-
   • Familiarize yourself with the key events of the story beforehand so that you can tell the story without reading or looking at notes later. As long as these elements are present in your telling, the specific words and grammar that you use don’t matter too much.
   • Make sure you project your voice sufficiently so that the people at the back of the room can hear you clearly. At the same time don’t make too much of a performance out of it. You want the learners to feel that you are talking directly to them.
   • Think about which parts of the story the learners may find challenging to understand. Which strategies could you use to help them with these?
   • With some stories a few simple props may aid comprehension. Make sure you get these ready beforehand.
   • Think of some ways in which you can use gesture and movement to help learners comprehend what you are saying.
   • Try to make eye contact with as many of the people as possible during the telling. Not only does this help the learners to feel more involved but it also allows you to gauge how well they are following what you are saying.
   • Be as spontaneous as possible in the way that you tell it. If you feel you need to speak more slowly, to repeat a section, or to paraphrase or translate something, then do so.
2. Ask different groups of learners to write a short dialogue based on a part of the story you told. You could either assign a different part to each group, or let them choose it themselves. Check their work for accuracy as they are doing it, pushing them to use language at the edges of their abilities.
3. When they’ve finished ask them to think about they would add gestures and movement to make the scene come alive. If space allows they can practice this. They should also think about how they would say the lines in order to make it as meaningful as possible. This stage needs careful monitoring from you.
4. When they’re ready, ask them learn their scenes by heart and then perform them in front of the class. The rest of the class can observe and comment on what they see.

Follow up: For homework students might like to develop their scene into a script for the whole story. These could then be performed in front of other classes, presented via video conference link up to other students around the world, or filmed and put on a video sharing site like www.youtube.com/

Older learners (15+) can also create plays based on social issues in the country where they live. Ask each group to prepare a still image which represents one of these social issues. These can then shown at the front of the class for interpretation and discussion. Now ask each group to improvise a scene which uses their still image as either the start or the end point. Finally ask them to work their improvisation into a written script for performance.

Additional resources: Videos of teachers in Gaza telling some traditional Middle Eastern stories in English can be accessed here.

Juha and the meat: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exyq53OvIV8
Jbene: www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQuYUfDJZA
The farmer who followed his dream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IocyfSxPvE

Materials: None required

The audience

Hamlet was right of course about the play being a vehicle by which the conscience of the audience may be stirred. A play only becomes a performance when there is somebody there to watch it, and the children in Gaza who have taken part in activities like those outlined above would very much like to share their work with other classes around the world. The stories that they perform are often simplified and modernised versions of very old Palestinian folk tales; part of a cultural heritage that has been ignored, denied even, by many Governments and by large sections of the world’s media. They are performed by children who are, in effect, imprisoned within their own country. Putting on a play and then performing it to an international audience, either live, or through a platform like youtube, is a way to give a voice to the voiceless, and to show the world that you're not going anywhere, as you have nowhere at all to go to! For these reasons you, the potential audience, have an important role to play in this. So far, The Hands Up Project has arranged live links to classes in Gaza with children in Brazil, Russia, Spain, and the UK, and with teachers all over the world. If you would like to link up the young learners in your English classes with children in Gaza so that they can perform plays to each other then please contact us at info@handsupproject.org.

References

Bellot, J (1586) Familiar Dialogues cited in Howatt A.P.R (2004) A history of English Language Teaching; OUP

Bilbrough, N (2016) Stories Alive ; The British Council

Boal, A (1992) Games for Actors and Non Actors; Routledge

Folse, K (2004) Vocabulary Myths ; University of Michigan Press

Shakespeare, W (1603) Hamlet

Thornbury, S (2013) The Learning Body in Meaningful Action by Arnold J and Murphey,T (eds); CUP

Wagner, B (1999) Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a learning medium; Calendar islands publishers

Wertenbaker, K (1988) Our Country’s Good; Dramatic publishing company

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Drama Techniques for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Multiple Intelligences course at Pilgrims website.