DRAMA – 7

This week, we talked about role-playing which refers to the changing of

one's behavior to assume or to act out a role. It can be a beneficial, motivating
and educative tool in the classroom because students generally enjoy this hands-
on approach to learning and they learn to work with different personalities,
beliefs, value systems and abilities.
We also mentioned creating of our professional persona-identity- and
positive correlations between role-playing the part of a person one aspires to be
and the development of one’s self-esteem. By acting like the professional we
want to be, our self-confidence will likely improve, thus allowing us to be that
professional.
Moreover, we touched on the importance of creating character and
stressed that the most important precondition for successful role creation is
simply to have identified the characteristics of the teacher we aspire to possess.
That’s to say, we should know what we want and how we want to be.
Finally, we talked about storytelling which is one of the types of drama
activities for EFL. It is a form of role-play as the teacher takes on a different
persona, the role of narrator. It is also educative because it holds students’
attention, teaches values and helps the students to develop their imagination. As
teachers, we should play the part of narrator as well as any and all other
characters in the story using different voice and body language to make the
difference between the characters clearer and repeating linguistic structures
permanently.

Munise ÖZTÜRK