Description of a Theatre Review Writing Task in an Online University Classroom Setting

The Internet provides us with a plethora of material to read and view and is the tool that people use today to communicate and acquire information. YouTube is a globally-used platform for individuals and organizations to share audio and visual material. Due to the COVID-19 situation, many teachers in schools and universities have looked to this website to supplement their teaching as it provides a scope and depth of material that is easily and readily accessible to the public. Theatres having been forced to close because of the pandemic have used this platform to share their work, and many teachers, especially those teaching theatre or performance-related studies have accessed recordings of performances to use in the online classroom as it is, as far as I know, the only way to access the arts for free during the pandemic. As a teacher of English language with an interest in drama and theatre arts, I had been viewing many free performances as I hope to share and foster an appreciation of drama and theatre in my students. With that in mind, I attempted to design a theatre reviewing task for use in the EFL classroom. The report shows my findings and my reflections of the task, and reveals that viewing and writing about the theatre arts can have a positive influence on students.

Reflections on an Online Project-based Oral Interpretation Course: Seeking to Improve Student Emotional Well-being with a Parody Song Project

In April 2020, the corona virus pandemic caused most universities in Japan, and the rest of the world, to go online. This article reflects upon the challenges faced in creating an online asynchronous oral interpretation class. Through the reflection, the need for sensitivity and attention to student well-being, particularly mental well-being, is considered an essential focus for the teacher, in addition to learning. The article introduces a parody song project created which focused on nurturing the emotional well-being of the students. 2020年度前期は新型コロナウィルスの影響により日本においても多くの授業がオンラインで行われた。この論文では、ドラマの授業の中でも、特にオーラルインタープリテーションの授業においてオンデマンド方式で授業を行った試みを取り上げる。オンラインであるからこそ、学生の、特に1年生のメンタルケアに心を配る必要がある。この論文では、その点を考慮して行ったパロディーソングプロジェクトを紹介する。

Teacher-in-Role as a Tool for Scaffolding Role Plays in the English Classroom

While most drama-in-education activities include the students in the dramatic process, the teachers are often excluded. This exclusion creates a gulf between the fictional world inhabited by the students and the real world of the teacher, making it difficult for the teachers to scaffold and challenge the students without undermining the fictional world. One exception to this phenomenon is Teacher-in-Role. This article will analyze the process drama technique called Teacher-in-Role and discuss its functions, types, benefits, potential challenges, and solutions to avoid or manage these challenges. This article also includes examples of Teacher-in-Role to provide the readers with a better understanding of how this process drama technique can be used.

Conducting a Micro-Evaluation in an EFL Classroom for a Performance-Assisted Learning Activity

Performance–assisted learning (PAL) was introduced at the 2017 annual Japanese Association for Language Teaching (JALT) conference. It was revealed to be a “new concept in education” and that EFL university teachers were “extremely excited about its efficacy and power to motivate” (Head et al., 2018, p. 233). However, it was claimed that in many institutions, English department administrators did not share the same enthusiasm, seeing PAL activities as not academic enough. This study aims to gather a variety of qualitative data to validate the use of PAL. Over 5 weeks, a micro-evaluation involving a number of data sets was conducted on two university classes, containing 46 students in total, for a PAL activity (in this case, a four-page skit). The evaluations were individual student journals, peer-assessment, creative writing, teacher observation, and a video. The study describes the 5-week project procedure, and aims to provide more comprehensive evidence to support the use of PAL in the EFL classroom. Findings indicate very positive student engagement in the project, and a need to give more explicit instruction to students for the creative writing task.

Process Drama and Teacher in Role in ELT

This paper is a discussion of the potential of using specific drama techniques during English lessons at a Japanese private senior high school. The techniques in focus are process drama and specifically teacher in role (TiR). TiR is a specific technique that is often used in the broader area of process drama. Process drama concerns itself more with the experiential rather than the performance aspect of drama. In it, a teacher, or facilitator, goes into role with the participants in the co-construction of extended role-plays and dramas. Such methods have been used in English language teaching by many practitioners. The methods are discussed in this paper, with the focus on their suitability for teaching in a Japanese senior high school.

Japanese University Students’ Experiences from Participating in an Unsupervised Google Classroom Debate Forum

A question of interest to language teachers who plan on utilizing an online debate forum as a research or teaching tool is “What do students who have participated in an online debate forum think of the activity?” This paper describes a study that focused on an online debate forum accessed through Google Classroom and reports the experiences of Japanese learners of English who used this unsupervised platform to practice their debate skills. The paper also reports improvements to the activity suggested by the participants for future studies.

Top Ten Improv Games for EFL Classrooms

This paper focuses on improvisation (also known as improv), which is one of the dramatic techniques that teachers are using in EFL classrooms today. Many teachers have found that improvisation is valuable for a multitude of reasons, including increasing student motivation and lowering foreign language anxiety, creating a positive learning environment, and generally increasing the level of enjoyment for foreign language students. There are numerous possibilities for teachers who would like to use improv games as a main component, or as a supplement, to the standard curriculum in their foreign language classes. This paper discusses the history of improvisation, and then gives a detailed explanation of ten popular improv games that teachers can use in their classes. It should be noted that these games are discussed as used by the author and may not match exactly with the definitions or parameters of similar games found on improvisation websites or in books about improvisation.

Conducting Research on Performance-Assisted Learning

Teachers who include performance activities in their course syllabus may find it difficult to convince administrators and other teachers of the value of its use, and one of the reasons is a lack of research data on the efficacy of performance use in teaching. This article proposes that practitioners of Performance-Assisted Learning (PAL) conduct micro-evaluations of the PAL activities that they do in class. The aggregation of such evaluations will form a macro-evaluation of PAL and may provide support for the use of PAL. The micro-evaluations would be based on the Ellis (1997) article on task evaluation which is described in detail in this article.

English Noh Theater Workshop: Lessons from a Japanese University EFL Classroom

Recognizing the value of performing arts activities within EFL education, teachers have experimented with a wide variety of approaches in their teaching. This article draws broadly on one such project which took place at a prefectural university in Fukushima during late 2016 and early 2017. Here, English was embedded in a traditional Japanese dramatic form and students in a third-year elective course developed an English language Noh theatre set in cyberspace. While this work is discussed in detail elsewhere (Rockell, 2019), the current article focuses on some of the practical ways the project was carried out and uses these ways as a basis for a suggested English Noh Theatre workshop to be offered to language teachers in Japan in the near future.

Living Newspaper in the English Discussion Classroom

Since 2003, the Japanese government has been urging universities to improve and reform the way they teach English to develop young people who can actively and immediately work in global contexts after graduation (MEXT, 2003). Some universities are using drama in the English language classroom to nurture students’ creativity, cooperation, and confidence. As has been shown, drama brings a multitude of psychological and communicative benefits – it helps students think about pronunciation, meaning, emotion, motivation, cooperation, confidence, and active participation, all of which can help to promote language acquisition and the spontaneous use of language (Miccoli, 2003; Ranzoni, 2003; Sato, 2001; Shapiro & Leopold, 2012; Zyoud, 2010). With a background in theatre and some useful drama resources at my disposal, I have been seeking ways to give my English classes a communicative and performative edge, and this article examines how I tried to incorporate a drama activity into my university discussion class.