Language Teaching as a Performing Art
Mark Almond, Senior Lecturer, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
The reason for my investigating the use of acting and performance skills in English language teaching essentially derives from the continuing discovery that there seems to be a distinct lack of training for teachers in the kind of interpersonal skills that other so-called live performers often seem to excel at. In my research and work as a teacher trainer, this is true for European teachers as well as teachers of very large classes often with more restricted resources such as in India and China, for whom the use of such performance-related skills are even more essential. A crucial aspect of a teacher’s job, especially one who teaches communicatively, is to interact with, engage and motivate students and facilitate their learning. Teacher training programmes train us to teach grammar, lexis and the four skills of speaking, writing, listening and reading but what is so often missing is the training in socio-psychological and interpersonal skills that we need to create an appropriately conducive environment for learning that is relatively stress-free, enjoyable and one that engenders a positive attitude towards the teacher and the subject as well as amongst the learners themselves.
So how can we achieve this with a class of learners, all with different personalities, learning styles and strategies and in different moods when they enter the room? How can certain performance skills help teachers and why are they relevant? Which specific performance skills can be transferred to the classroom? These are the questions I hope to answer here.
Why are Performance Skills Useful?
Conscientious teachers should always be looking for ways to develop and improve their teaching skills because they genuinelywant their learners to share their passion for language and communication and wantto see them make progress and be successful while at school and in later life.
With any communicative approach, being inside an English language classroom should be an authentic experience where inter-communication can occur naturally and where all participants including the teacher interact in a natural and human way. In psychology, it is claimed that in order to create an effective learning environment, all participants need respect and empathy towards each other and what Carl Rogers terms ‘authenticity’ (1990) – in other words being yourself without hiding behind job titles, roles or masks. This point is particularly salient when considering issues of discipline. It is true to say that most classroom settings don’t resemble any other setting in which we might find ourselves in the outside world: with one person, the teacher, standing up front sharing knowledge, involving learners and orchestrating interactive activities. So as language teachers, if we believe that essentially our job is to help our learners become confident, effective, articulate and independent users of English in the real world, we need to make our classrooms less alien places so there can be a natural exchange of thoughts and ideas, natural language practice, a natural desire to communicate and learn from each other and a natural desire to develop relationships between learners themselves and between the teacher and learners.
So, even though I do not believe with the common metaphor for teaching that teachers are actors and performers, I strongly believe certain performance skills might be deemed relevant because:
- they can make lessons enjoyable – they give students a positive attitude towards the language and will hopefully make the learning experience more memorable and meaningful because anxiety is low
- teachers want to be viewed positively by their learners that can, in turn,increase motivation and again will promote a more positive attitude towards English and education in general
- they help teachersdevelop strong rapports with their learners and highlight the importance of social skills both at school and outside
Which Performance Skills And How To Use Them?
Classroom presence Just as actors have stage or screen presence, we as teachers can develop classroom presence by transferringcertain skills to the classroom. This can be achieved by maximizing the creative use of the natural resources teachers already possess: a voice (pitch, pace, volume, tone, breathing and pausing); the ability to use facial expression and gesture; movement; posture and a space in which to teach. The use of each of these needs to remain varied and engaging and the teacher needs to continuously reflect and assess the affective impact they have on the learners and their learning. Creative use of these serves directly to connect with our learners on a human and emotional level and develop appropriate dynamics for any methodology to be effective. Just as they are used in theatre and film to establish relationships between characters, maintain interest, control attention and emotionally engage the audience, they are devices that can be equally effective in the classroom. In practical teacher training seminars and workshops, participants usually highlight the importance of smiling, opening body language, a comfortable and varied pace of speech, posture, eye contact, varied positioning in the room and strength and quality of voice.
Eye Contact How important is making genuine eye contact with your students? For how long should you make eye contact with someone without making them feel uncomfortable? How do you share eye contact equally and naturally? On stage, it is essential you make genuine eye contact with your co-actors in order to provoke a spontaneous and natural reaction as well as to convince your audience that the actor is “in the moment”. Occasionally, it is necessary for an actor to speak directly to the audience, as with Shakespeare’s soliloquies. With a small audience, making genuine eye contact does not pose too much of a problem but with large audiences it is more difficult, but nevertheless itis still possible to make people feel seen. Some actors divide up the auditorium and move from one section to another giving the impression of making eye contact.
Spontaneity and readiness to improvise To an extent, teachers have to be expert improvisers e.g coping when a lesson lags or a student becomes disruptive. Sometimes in these situations, we need to increase our energy, adjust what we’re doing or just leave an activity and move onto something else. What is certainly true is that we need to stay alert. We need to be tuned into our students and have our radar turned on all the time. We need to be experts in reading a situation and our students and reacting appropriately and spontaneously.
Setting Up Anticipation and Arousing Curiosity. How can we immediately arouse our learners’ curiosity to maintain their attention? Putting a visual aid or piece of realia at the front of the class at the beginning of the lesson which you’re going to use later on works well. It seems to be considered good practice these days to announce at the beginning of a lesson the different stages the class will follow. However, if appropriate, let each classroom activity be revealed one at a time to create suspense and surprise. I remember once going into class aiming to practise question forms with narrative tenses. I began by dramatically announcing that a teacher had been murdered. It must have been convincing because the whole class believed it for the first few minutes (until I could keep up the pretence no more)! I had their full attention right from the beginning of the lesson as they asked questions trying to solve the murder.
Conveying Enthusiasm and Energy and Appearing “fresh” David Raven once held the world record for being ‘the most durable actor’ for his 4,575 performances in The Mousetrap in London. Each time he played Major Metcalfe, it had to be as though it were for the first time. Teachers often have to teach the same language points and skills with the same materials but it should always be delivered as though it were for the first time: with freshness, energy and excitement.
Creative and Spontaneous use of Gesture and Facial Expression The key to an effective use of movement and facial expression in the classroom is variety but of course learners will only respond positively if the animation is natural. Non-excessive movement of the body, including facial expression and eye contact, is especially linked to the effective teaching of language because gesture and facial expression help clarify and demonstrate meaning and above all are expressive and can supplement the verbal message. It’s important to remember that as humans, we cannot not communicate – our faces, bodies and voices always convey some message to our listeners but we’re not always aware of what that message mightbe. Before the teaching day begins, teachers would be well advised to follow a similar warm-up routine to actors: flexing face muscles and exercising the articulators with voice exercises.
Creative Use of Movement and Space It’s often impossible to reconfigure the layout of classrooms in certain classrooms (heavy tables, restricted space etc), so what can the teacher do to vary his/her movement and make more creative use of the space? In theatre, determining where an actor moves or stands on stage is called blocking. Blocking is vital in establishing relationships between characters, maintaining audience interest and controlling audience attention. In the same way, teachers should vary the way space is used in the classroom and how different positioning can help maintain interest and motivation during the lesson. Lots of us do this already but sometimes, we need to consciously decide to adjust our position to vary classroom dynamics e.g occasionally teaching from the back of the classroom making the back-row students the front-row students and vice versa; kneeling or crouching down between desks; crouching down at the front of the room; sitting behind a vacant desk amongst the students; sitting on the teacher’s desk; sitting on a student’s desk; sitting on the floor; leaning on a student’s desk entering his/her personal space; weaving slowly between the students’ desks; standing in the doorway; standing on a chair or table … the possibilities are manifold.
Creative Use of Voice
In my own research and seminars and workshops I run for in-service teachers, I am discovering that teachers from all over the world are not trained in voice maintenance or creative use of voice and this is an area that can be directly transferred from the craft of acting. Exercises I ask teachers to participate in include work on diaphragmatic breathing, posture, pitch, pace, volume/projection and tone. There are numerous exercises that I use to demonstrate to trainees how wonderfully versatile all of our voices are and how important it is to look after them.
Appropriate Use of Humour
There are many ways and obvious benefits of incorporating humour into our teaching, not least because it lowers natural anxiety felt by some students in a classroom setting but it also increases motivation and engagement as it helps the teacher and consequently the language be viewed more positively. It can also act as an effective mnemonic. Tauber and Mester (1994) rightly note though that humour should be used in moderation and teachers should avoid making too many self-deprecating remarks and remarks that will lower the self-esteem of the learners just to get a laugh.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in my research there is wide consensus that the communicative language classroom is a social situation or event in which the usual social rules should be followed: the rules that nurture and develop relationships and facilitate natural communication; show respect; offer acceptance of ideas; allow space and time to process and respond to questions and chunks of information and recognize that students are individuals with their own sets of values, beliefs and learning styles and strategies. And it seems thus far in my research that certain performance skills and aspects of an actor’s training can assist in maintaining an environment conducive to learning and practising the language communicatively. Amidst the pressure of new technologies entering classrooms on a global scale that some would argue are insulating learners, I am suggesting here that we redress the balance and put much more appropriate emphasis on the human aspects of teaching. My forthcoming book, provisionally titledInterpersonal Skills for Teachers, will deal in detail with the theory behind human communication in the classroom drawing on fields such as Acting and Performance, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Interpersonal and Group Communication, Flow and Social Psychology. The book will also offer a large number of practical activities that teachers can engage in either individually, in workshops or as part of a teacher development programme. It will be published by Pavilion in 2016.
Bibliography and Recommended Reading
Almond, M (2005), Teaching English With Drama, Pavilion Publishing
Churches, R and Terry, R (2010), Neuro Linguistic Programming for Teachers, Crown House
Csikszentmaihalyi, M (2002), Flow, Rider
Johnstone, K (1981), Impro, Methuen
Johnstone, K (1999), Impro for Storytellers, Routledge
Rodenburg, P (2009), Presence, Penguin
Rogers, C (1990), The Interpersonal Relationship in the Facilitation of Learning in the Carl Rogers Reader in Kirschenbaum, H and Henderson, V (eds), Constable
Tauber, R T & Mester, C S (1994), Acting Lessons for Teachers, Praeger
Williams, M and Burden, L (2007), Psychology for Language Teachers, CUP
Mark Almond, Senior Lecturer, CanterburyChristChurchUniversity
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