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When Statues Come Alive: Teaching and Learning Academic Vocabulary Through Drama in Schools
Author(s) -
Can Anneliese
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.1002/tesq.344
Subject(s) - drama , vocabulary , scholarship , pedagogy , embodied cognition , mathematics education , class (philosophy) , language acquisition , teaching method , point (geometry) , sociology , psychology , ethnography , linguistics , computer science , visual arts , art , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , artificial intelligence , political science , anthropology , law
With the high numbers of English learners ( EL s) in school and rising demands for students to become proficient in academic forms of English, it is increasingly crucial for teachers to have effective, innovative tools to make content and language accessible to students. Adolescent EL s in particular are at a critical point in their educational careers, yet often underrepresented in scholarship. In this article, the author focuses on findings on academic language instruction derived from a yearlong ethnographic study of a middle school class for newcomers taught using drama‐based techniques. The findings illustrate how this kind of work can engender communication and linguistic risk taking among EL s. Concepts from Bakhtin's (1981) analysis of language and power, along with the notion of embodied learning, serve as guiding ideas in examining the data. The qualitative data reveal both the problems of reductive approaches to teaching academic language and the efficacy and power of multimodal, embodied pedagogies wherein students are able to both learn critical forms of language and make them personally relevant.