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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.
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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.
Vygotsky arguedthat children learn by solving problems. Through interactions with care givers, the young child realizes that words are signals. By practicing the language behaviors used by parents and siblings, the child gradually learns to 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 interms of learning language
Dramatic play, which comes naturally to young children, may offer a solution If children construct their knowledge through social interactions, then dramatic play may be a key mechanism for internalizing Information about the world via language. If so, dramatic play could provide pivotal support for language development.
Teachers routinely read to children, but ELs may not understand enough of the vocabulary to benefit The presence of pictures can help in connecting text 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 initially comprehend 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 feelings and utterances appropriate for their character in the story. They not only come to comprehend individual words, but also the arc of the narrative and the motivations of the characters.
