A Case Study of Enhancing Interaction in an English Class through Drama Activities

Abstract

This paper reports on a case study in which drama activities were used to enhance student interaction and factors that affect learners’ turn taking ratio during the interaction among a group of three young learners. The experiment was conducted over 8 lessons a one-month period at a private English language academy during which the participants took part in. Two regular lessons and six lessons using drama-based activities were conducted. The lessons were videotaped and all the classroom interaction was transcribed and analysed using van Lier’s ‘Turn-taking’ and four ‘Turn Initiative Types’. It was to measure whether the students took more of turn taking in the interaction during the lessons that implied drama based activities than the regular ones. In addition, through the analysis of the video, the researcher tried to explore factors that affect the student’s turn taking frequency and types of turn takings. The results revealed a increase in the number of instances of turn taking ratio in the drama based classes in comparison to that of the regular lessons. For the more, the students made the biggest increase in the Topic Management(TM) amongst other four types of turn initiatives. Also it indicated the role of personality, linguistic level, and familiarity of learning and teaching norm in the lesson as the affective factors. Therefore, the study concluded with an effective role of drama activities for enhancing the students’ participation during the classroom interaction. It also suggests to have further study about reflecting personality and linguistic levels in implying drama based activities in young English learners’ interaction enhancement.