Silent Skit Reflection

1. What challenges did you face when trying to tell you story in as much detail as
possible?
We had to trim some our ideas for the scenes out due to not being able to accurately
portray it in our skit. If we tried to use our original ideas, we feared the audience would
not grasp a full understanding of what would be going on. It was also challenging for us
to back track and think of ways to complete this silently because we already had our
whole plot and scenes set up. It made us really stop and think of different ways,
techniques and platforms to use to get our message across.
2. What did you do to overcome these challenges?
To overcome these challenges we used different techniques such as a PowerPoint of
pictures for backgrounds for all the different scenes. We used sounds that we created our
selves as well as props and a lot of physical gestures and facial expressions
3. What do you think the main purpose of this activity was?
I think that main purpose of this activity was for us to gain a better understanding of how
it is possible to overcome language barriers and obstacles. Although we were unable to
use our words to convey our story to the audience, we were able to still have them
understand us by using different ideas and techniques.
4. How can you relate this activity to the experience of ELL students in an Englishspeaking classroom?
This is a very real occurrence for ELL students in an English-speaking classroom.
Both the ELL students and non-ELL students, including the teacher, must have some way
to communicate, even without a common language. All parties must find a way to
understand one another and they do so by using some of the techniques that we used.
These techniques were ones that I recently used myself while in Honduras. I did not
speak Spanish and the children there did not speak English. We had to find other ways to
communicate such as head gestures and facial expressions. BY doing so, we were able to
communicate without words and still understand one another.