How Drama & Movement Can Support Language Development

in the Primary Grades

The Dilemma

• One in four California kindergarteners speaks a language other than English at home.

• Nationwide, the number of school-aged English learners (ELs) is growing rapidly.

• Between the 1997–98 and 2008–09 school years, the number of ELs increased by 51%.

• Nearly 70% of ELs read at a below basic level.

Social Science Research Can Help

• Research supports the pivotal importance of verbal interaction to English language development (Fillmore & Snow, 2000).

• Monolingual learners benefit from oral language practice.

• But ELs need such practice even more (Castro, Páez, Dickinson, & Frede, 2011) because they have fewer chances to use English at home.

Dealing with Classroom Realities

• With class sizes growing in the wake of 2008 recession, oral language practice is limited.

• While teacher has a one-on-one conversation with one student, others work alone at desk.

• Small group instruction also leaves most of class at their desks, filling out workbook pages

• Solution is needed that would allow whole class to daily engage in structured verbal interaction under close adult supervision.

Conceptual Framework:

Universal patterns regarding how children learn language suggest arts

strategies can improve learning

Why should creative drama and movement boostlanguage development?

Before a child begins to talk…

the child spontaneously communicates

by crying in pain, laughing with joy, pointing at a desired object.

This works well as long as the child’s needs are simple…

and adults are sensitive to the child’s desires.

But problems arise when adults don’t understand…

Or an adult has other plans.

Vygotsky arguedthat children learn by solving problems.

Through interactions with care givers, the young child realizes that words are signals.

By practicing the languagebehaviors used by parents and siblings, the child gradually learnsto communicate his or her desires using words.

If Vygotsky was correct, social interaction plays a pivotal role in children’s language

development.

That means that isolating a child at a desk may handicap the child in terms of learning language

Dramatic play, which comes naturally to young children, may offer a solution

If children constructtheir knowledge through social interactions,then dramatic playmay be a key mechanism for internalizing Information about the world via language.

If so, dramatic play could provide pivotal support forlanguage development.

Teachers routinely read to children, but ELs may not understand enough of the vocabulary to benefit

The presence of pictures can help in connectingtext to meaning.

But pictures are not always enough,especially when a child is learning a new language.

In contrast, when childrenphysically act out scenesfrom stories, they bring their own experiences to bear.

Dramatization helps children to better understand the plot -- and the feelings of the characters --even if a child does not initiallycomprehend all of the words.

Over time, dramatizing words and actions of characters enables children to“touch, see, and experience the meaning of the words” (Mages, 2006, p. 335).

Connecting with prior experience

Having fed the make-believe situation into their own knowledge base, children arrive at feelingsand utterances appropriate for their characterin the story.

They not only come to comprehend individual words, but also the arc of the narrative and the motivations of the characters.