|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Bureau
of Educational and Cultural Affairs 
The Dramatic Game and the Conversational Act Sarah Sharim-Paz Teaching intermediate or advanced students of EFL conversational English is difficult and almost impossible. Conversing involves far more than a broad knowledge of the language; it has to do not only with words and structures but with the conventions for interaction, the negotiation of meaning, the understanding of social relationships expressed in a foreign tongue, and the options available for formality and informality in speech. To define “conversation” we should start by saying that it is an activity at the upper end of the cline or continuum of oral language-the lower end being formal oral discourse, and the upper end free and spontaneous speech. It is an unplanned activity of which the main characteristic is spontaneity; unpredictability is frequently observed, and a sense of involvement of both speaker and listener is present (Tannen 1989). The great variety of topics and the use of fragmented language, with lexis dependent on content, where turn-taking is fast and where posture, gestures, and quality can interfere with meaning, are of paramount importance and cannot be overlooked in the conversational event. The conversational act The need for conversing is always present in the teaching-learning process of EFL. Our students demand activities that will ensure the development of conversational skills, and teachers must be able to develop conversational competence in the target language, which is as important for the student as is grammatical competence. One way is to rely on the learners’ knowledge of conversing in their mother tongue; they are used to interacting and exchanging information in their Ll; they know how to negotiate meaning and action in communicating with others. But there are cross-cultural differences between Ll and L2 that render the activity of conversing in one different from the activity of conversing in the other, and there are norms and conventions that must be identified in one and in the other if we are to consider a speech event as conversation and not merely as talk. Another alternative is to follow Cook’s suggestions in his book Discourse (1989). He says that there are ways in which the “insights of conversation analysis can be exploited in the classroom” (1989:117), and he adds that there are phrases, words, expressions, and paralinguistic features associated with particular turn types that can be taught. In addition to this, formulaic speech such as greetings, introductions, and farewells can also be made explicit to the student. But telling someone how to open and close a conversation is not enough. We have seen-more than once-that if a student is given a flow diagram to convert into a dialogue or a piece of conversation, he or she will follow the instructions given but the result will not qualify as a conversational event nor will it lead to one, because of the artificiality of the language chosen and because the student does not consider the face-to-face interaction with all that that implies. However, I believe that the problem of developing conversational competence has a solution if we take into account the following assumptions: 1. Conversation has a specific structure that is different from that of other forms of oral speech, such as interviews, talks, debates, lectures, and so on, and therefore should not be studied and developed in the same way. 2. We should speak of stimulating students or participants to converse rather than giving them ready-made formulas. 3. We should emphasize the interactional encounter, which is the centre of the conversational process, and stimulate the negotiation between participants on the basis of chains of utterances rather than chains of sentences. These assumptions are the frame that holds together the design of what we believe stimulates the students, and they determine the type of activity that will be undertaken. The dramatic game The tool I have used with my students is the dramatic game: an activity where the participants improvise dialogues to fit a situation that is described beforehand, and then perform it. There are two kinds of improvisations. In both the participants act without referring to a script. In the first, the situation is described and analyzed with the teacher/director in a sort of panel meeting. The story is studied and alternatives proposed for the action and the development of the plot. Once it is performed, the teacher/director corrects language mistakes and gives suggestions for the performance. Then the scene can be played once more and evaluated again. In the other type of improvisation, time for preparation is limited to five minutes and then performers act it out, inventing the dialogue as they proceed. This is the true dramatic game. The actors do what they think best and enjoy their experience; the teacher does not interfere in any way, and the spectators-the rest of the participating group-can give their opinion only at the end of the performance. The scene cannot be done over again; another interpretation of the situation would be another improvisation, a new one altogether. Therefore, it is a unique experience for both actors and spectators. If we want students to play the game, we must introduce them little by little to free spontaneous work. If we do not supply them with appropriate warm-up sessions, the participants will not be able to fight their own natural inhibitions, and thus will not learn how to extend their abilities gradually. We must get them to relax and gain some practice in dramatics, so that they will become more self-confident and less reluctant to enter into the game. An experience I designed the following scheme for students of EFL at tertiary level. Taking into account that they were at a post-intermediate level and that the dramatic game had to be preceded by warm-up activities to ensure good results, I designed a three-stage treatment: (1) play reading, (2) paraphrasing the play read, and (3) the dramatic game. Stage 1. For the first stage, I used a short play that took no longer than 15 minutes. I chose an up-to-date topic: “home squatters,” with up-to-date language and few characters. The teacher became the director or coordinator of the reading of this play and of the performance; the students were the actors-a few of them at a time. There was no producer, no stage setting, and the amount of theatrical sophistication was reduced to a minimum. The students read the text and were able to describe the plot, the action, and the personality of the characters, and to suggest what they would do if they had to perform each of the parts. They worked with explicit language first, savoured the feel of it, and then explored implicit actions, reactions, moods, and style. Next, they read the play a second time, using their voices to reveal to an audience the character and the situation of each part. The teacher asked the students to observe the author’s stage directions but did not insist that they follow them if they did not feel at ease with them. She let them experiment with their voices and movements so that they felt free to express the complete range of moods in the play. How did I relate play reading to the conversational act? The following is just an example of the many things I did in trying to connect dialogue and conversational discourse. I looked at conversation from the point of view of the connections between utterances and interaction, and the way in which “meanings are communicated and interpreted in conversation through the adjacency pairs” (Richards and Schmidt 1983). Adjacency pairs are utterances produced by two successive participants, which are made up of two parts: the second utterance is related to the first as a necessary follow-up, as in the question-and-answer relationship. If one speaker asks a question, the second must give an answer. If the second speaker does not respond, there is something amiss, and it has to be filled in by an explanation. Our play opened thus: A: What do you want? Who are you? In this short scene A asks twice but does not get a reply from B. B, in turn, asks a question that is left unanswered; A asks again, and finally B responds to the second question framed by A. The delay in answering has an explanation; however, B must finally reply to allow for coherence in this short conversation. I took some time to pinpoint this to the students and to explain the implicit action present when the successive questions were asked and only one was answered. Many other instances in the play were analyzed, following the above pattern, and due importance was given to the beginning of the different scenes and to how each of them closed, to the way in which the topic of each scene depended on the person who was talking, to the characters’ short or long replies, to the cultural norms present in the interaction of participants, to the kind of turn-taking and the language used, to fillers and pauses, and so on. The next step was performing the play. The students did not have to memorize their lines; they were asked to have their scripts with them and to look at the words when necessary. In this way, the mere repetition of learnt-by-heart dialogue was avoided, and the participants became more aware of how the words fitted the action. Emphasis was placed on the way the words related to the behaviour of the characters, and importance was given to the rhythm and timing of the action. Little by little the students became involved in the activity, and they realized why pauses, silences, and fillers were relevant to their discourse. They could eventually control their movements, use facial and bodily gestures to convey meaning, and concentrate on the words and actions without feeling uncomfortable. Reading and performing a play is not meant to be an end in itself but a step toward fostering a climate of confidence among the students, engendering group cohesion, which is of paramount importance in creative work. Since performing the play is not an end in itself, the students are not required to reproduce it before an audience. The teacher can go on to the second stage if he/she finds that the students have overcome some of the difficulties they had at the beginning and that they are confident enough to start creating their own short sketches. However, I find it advisable to handle a script first and use it in as many sessions as possible so as to encourage students to attempt the improvisations later on. We must not force the participants beyond their capabilities, and we must always remember that the dramatic activity is a means of developing conversational skills. Therefore, when students claim that they do not want to perform before an audience because they do not want to become actors or actresses, we must refrain from forcing them to act, and we must go back to the text, revising the language used and making them converse. Stage 2. I called stage two “paraphrasing the play.” This meant that students had to work without a script and had to “invent” the text they had just performed. They already knew the outline of the plot, the succession of events, the characteristics of the different roles, the possibilities of dialogue, and so on. I asked them to use their own words as much as possible and not to deviate from the sequence of events. At the beginning the students were tongue-tied. They were unable to speak; they could not put together their own words and fit them to the action of the play they were “inventing.” They found that this activity limited them in their verbal expression, and they lost confidence in their ability to “invent” and perform. I had to slow down and divide the play into short scenes and do them one by one, giving the students time to concentrate on the words they were going to use and on the action that had to be developed. As paraphrasing the play became a demanding activity for students, I thought it would be better to go back to play reading. However, the experience had appealed to the participants, and they wanted to meet the challenge and go on with the exercise. Therefore, I encouraged them to do what they could: this meant that some parts of the action were skipped, that the lines, in general, lost the vitality they had in the original play, and that the characters looked somewhat less amusing. Little by little the students began to grasp that lines are appeals for action and that the dialogue works in the same way as a conversation. By imagining that the characters were talking to each other, rather than actors performing a play written by somebody else, the students were able to use their own language unaided by the script. But I wanted the group to get more experience in guided improvisations before tackling the dramatic game. I asked them if they could enact the final scene in a different way. Suggestions were offered, and the scene they had devised was performed. The change chosen stimulated the students to rearrange the play. They even realized that it was necessary to add scenes and that it was then essential to produce new dialogues. Even though this activity proved time-consuming, it held their interest, and they came to understand how the exercise developed their verbal and non-verbal expression of English. Stage 3. In the third stage of our treatment, I practised a freer form of improvisation: the dramatic game. The students had to prepare a short sketch on the spur of the moment. They had no script to hold onto and no lines to remember. I gave them slips of paper that outlined a situation or some sort of conflict-in short, a summary of a brief story. I made sure that the kinds of situations selected were familiar to the participants, because the topic should not be outside the student’s everyday experience if the improvisation was to be a useful dramatic vehicle. A student selected one of the situations and read it to find out what s/he was expected to do. S/he had to select the partner or partners who were going to perform with him/her. Let’s look at the following example. The slip of paper read like this:
I realized that this procedure-telling the story and the succession of events and letting the students make up the play-has its pros and cons. It is easier to invent the lines and words when the participants know the topic and the context towards which they must build a little sketch, but it has the disadvantage that, by keeping to the story and trying to develop it as suggested, the participants forget the drama of the event. However, the improvisation itself is not supposed to be a work of art, and if the characters are oversimplified, the conflict is reduced to external action only, and the words used have little dramatic effect, the exercise is still valid for our purposes. As I was interested in having my students interact, converse, and perform, I decided to change the contents of the slip of paper. I kept the number of performers involved and the situation, but limited this last aspect in the following way:
This is an improvisation of a more demanding character. I think it is not advisable to start with open-ended activities of this sort until we have tried the type of improvisation illustrated by our first example. However, this one proved to be a good way to find out how the students were able to create the sketch and reach a decision about characters, plot development, and appropriate lines to fit the action. Once the students had performed this exercise, they were ready to explain why they had developed the sketch the way they did and what limitations kept them from choosing some other approach. In this way, I gave the students more opportunities to bring in their own personalities, experience, and opinions, and they felt freer to invent and create in a relaxed atmosphere. Final comment I said at the beginning of this article that I was working with adult students-their average age was 22 years. I also said that my intention was to stimulate oral production and lead the students to the understanding of social conventions in dialogues and conversation, and to have them use these in a relaxed atmosphere where group cohesion was assumed to have paramount importance. Thus, I fostered not only social but linguistic development. The students collaborated, both individually and as a group, they created dialogues for situations in which there is a need for precise communication, they discovered the affective aspects that colour the language employed, they used their imagination and fantasy to enjoy themselves, and, most important of all, they practised speaking and conversing. When I started this process I had my doubts about the results I would obtain. I was impatient to see how it would work, and impatience is the most dangerous of all attitudes for the teacher/director. He/she has to allow students to get involved in a process which for some is difficult to understand and for others produces dread and inhibitions. The teacher must break the ice gently and rely on the capacity that human beings have to adapt-some more quickly than others. The reactions I observed were the signposts that told us when the participants were ready to go ahead with stages 2 and 3. If they were not ready for the dramatic game, the teacher had to provide extra warm-up activities and wait. If something went wrong, I had to go back to the previous exercise and do it again. This took time, but it was worth repeating bits and pieces. A final word: the teacher must know how to plan the activities, what to do first, and how to lead the students into performing. This does not mean that teachers must be actors, or even directors. If they have done a course in dramatics or consulted a theatre craft manual, so much the better, but what is required is class experience and how to manage groups of students. The teacher’s class experience is particularly valuable, and so is the teacher’s interest in activating the language class, in making it livelier and more participative. The dramatic game is one of the many techniques that can be used to foster participation in speaking and conversing. Courses and manuals are helpful, but it is the teacher’s common sense that must be relied on and the knowledge he/she has of the interaction process when people decide to communicate with one another. REFERENCES Cook, Guy. 1989. Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, J. C. and R. W. Schmidt. 1983. Conversational analysis. In Language and communication, ed. J. C. Richards and R. W. Schmidt. London: Longman. Tannen, D. 1989. Talking voices-Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | |||||||||||||||
 | |||
|
