Adapting play and drama for ESL lesson.

1. Look for situations in your course book where you can have your students role-play instead of just reading. Divide the class into small groups and have them come up with their own role-played versions of the situation, which they can act out in class. The same can be done with news articles or storybooks.

2. Liven up a quiet class with charades or a puppet theatre, particularly for young or beginning learners. You can involve the students on every level, from creating characters and drawing them to making a "stage." Sites such as KidInco (see Resources) offer free skits, play scripts and role plays that you can adapt to use drama in your ESL class.

3. Generate fluency using improve. Give your students a loose guide such as a TV interview, a celebrity talk show or a phone call. Give them a few minutes to organize themselves and prepare a "performance," which will require that they think on their feet and in the moment.

4. Select short scenes from a movie and play it for your students with the sound turned off. Divide your students into groups and have them play-act the scene, inputting words of their own. After the exercise, play the movie with the sound on for them to compare.

5. Integrate a writing exercise with drama by having students write letters, diary entries or news stories form the point of view of the character or describing events that caused or followed the situation used in the lesson.

How to select play and drama

Criterions to be taken into account when selecting play and drama
culture content interest values age resources proficiency level

CULTURE Learning this authentic material pupils get to know parts of a foreign culture. It satisfies childrens natural curiosity about everything new. Create a suitable context for learning this need to be natural, real and make sense to the child. It also needs to allow for the active discovery and construction of meaning, and lead to the use of language as a vehicle to do things which are relevant and purposeful. Being familiar with songs and rhymes in a foreign language pupils feel closer to the foreign culture and its language. If the pupils hear the same melodies or similar rhymes they are astonished at the parallels between their own culture and the foreign one. CONTENT We need to think about the status of the vocabulary in our lessons. We need to make sure that the meaning is clear. We need to encourage children to notice the form. We need to provide a variety of opportunities for recognising, practising and using the songs and poems.

INTEREST We need to create opportunities for children to extend and develop their skills according to their personal interests and abilities. The songs and poems need to have the motivation, develop imagination, stimulate curiosity, draw on personal experience, encourage participation and create a desire to continue learning

VALUES Relate learning to personal experiences Whenever possible, provide opportunities for children to make connections between their understanding of lesson themes and their own personal experiences. This consolidates understanding and promotes ownership of learning. Model behaviour that you would also like the children to adopt. For example, be polite and well-mannered, use please and thank you when you ask them to do things, smile and greet them whether in or out of the classroom. AGE Teachers are offered a great variety of stories, which are appropriate for the age group they teach and the level of the language their children have a grasp of. Too complicated and difficult stories may have discouraging affects on children. Children can understand literature in simple words and teacher should use materials that are easy to explain about. The songs and poetry needs to be related to their lives and fantasy as children in their ages have their own imagination.

RESOURCES When selecting songs and poems: Include different poets, genres, topics, and themes. Cover multiple time periods (historical past, present, future). Include literature with a collection of unforgettable characters.

Teacher can select their own collection of literature materials. The materials also can be found in the text book or you can make different by choosing the materials from other colleague.

PROFICIENCY LEVEL Use speech appropriate to childrens proficiency level take a leaf out of the book of parents and careers and adapt the speech you use to make it comprehensible, especially to very young children. This may mean, for example, simplifying the sentence you use, using repetition and speaking at a slower pace.