Drama as an Effective Teaching Tool for Primary Learners - Coursework Example

Some educators have managed to inject a semblance of animation into their teaching in order to engage the interest of the learners.  And by using the five senses of the learner, it has been possible to improve their absorption and enthusiasm in the learning process.  Drama potentially titillates all the senses and makes the process of learning easier, less of a chore, and more importantly, faster to remember.  This paper shall use various academic sources in order to discuss the use of drama in literacy, with reference to drama and the curriculum; and discussing the benefits and negative aspects of drama in writing, reading, speaking, and listening skills and teaching drama methods.

  Through this discussion, it is hoped that a thorough understanding of the complicated learning process can be assessed. Integrating drama into the curriculum is an important first step towards the introduction of drama as a learning tool.  By integrating drama into the curriculum, it is possible to link the “tasks of teaching, learning, and inquiry to the authentic interests, concerns, and energies of students”.  Through a curriculum which is integrated with drama, the learners have a new way of interacting with each other; and to break out of the conventions that bind and often restrict the learning process.

   Writing is an especially complicated and difficult learning task for most students or learners.  Many experts claim that boys struggle with it more than girls.  And these experts claim that “drama can be a strong support in providing meaningful contexts that stimulate and motivate children to write, both in and out of the drama, individually and collectively”.  Through drama, the children are given a context by which they can base their topic on.  The students have a more tangible basis for their thoughts and their potential writing thoughts.

  Their imagination would not have to be based on concepts and materials which would be too hard to imagine because their thoughts are already engaged in a rich and colorful context.  Through drama, the fictional roles are engaged and fictional viewpoints are also established by the writer.  The child can easily imagine what he would write about in the form of the characters that he sees and listens to.  Consequently, he now has a reason for writing arising from the imagined dramatic experience.

  The ultimate purpose of writing is to affect and engage other people’s imagination.  By using drama as a tool in the writing process, the child can get an immediate reaction from his audience, and therefore judge the effectiveness of his writing.  And “as drama creates a genuine context for the exploration of text to raise children’s literary awareness, it simultaneously creates an exciting context for writing”. Through drama, writing becomes a less technical exercise with rules on subject-verb agreement and rhetoric; it now becomes a subjective and even reflective process where the story-telling and expressive qualities of the student are explored.

  The mastery of the technical skills in writing is often learned skills which would later be improved by the student as more writing opportunities are presented.  By integrating drama in writing, the children’s imaginative thinking is developed and this consequently gives the child the “confidence to embark on what for many children can be an arduous and stressful task”.