Dramatic strategies promote and facilitate not only the development of linguistic skills, but also cooperation, team-building, the improvement of emotional and intellectual competences and last, but not least, cultural awareness and creativity.
Teaching English to primary, lower-secondary, secondary and upper-secondary levels on a daily basis has given me a lot of chances to use (nursery) rhymes, tongue twisters, dramatic reading, picture books, comics, pantomime, role-playing, poetry recitation, story-telling and many other authentic resources with my students in an attempt to prepare them for life outside the classroom. To achieve this, during most of my ESL classes, I used movement, speech, improvisation and scene work and, sometimes, I even incorporated visual arts, music and dance/choreography to encourage student involvement, active participation and effective learning for the real world. However, formal education is not always able to provide real-life knowledge, competence development and challenging learning contexts. This is one of the main reasons why extracurricular activities come to the rescue of both the teachers and the students.
Between 2017 and 2019 I coordinated an Erasmus+ project entitled “Crossing Borders with Modern Media and Drama”. Some of the most important project activities were related to the teaching of English through drama, which definitely improved my students’ verbal and non-verbal communication, their listening and observation skills, helping them to become more confident, more empathetic and more understanding. Taking part in the acting of several plays provided the students with an opportunity to relate to different contexts, characters and cultures and use English for real-life purposes on the global stage.