USING STORY-BASED DRAMA AND RELATED CREATIVE ACTIVITIES TO TEACH ENGLISH TO KINDERGARTEN PUPILS

USING STORY-BASED DRAMA AND RELATED CREATIVE ACTIVITIES TO TEACH ENGLISH TO KINDERGARTEN PUPILS

Üstünel, Eda
Pektaş, Havva Sümeyra

In the learning process for all human beings, play takes a place as universal, innate, and a lifelong social behaviour of having crucial importance (Pramling & Carlsson, 2008). Creative drama is an efficient way to hearten students “experience” rather than discuss in classroom context, where the teacher and students become players. Story making is not always merely an individualized activity; to create imaginative accounts of everyday and fantasy scenarios, young children also have fun co-constructing stories and make use of each other’s experiences and knowledge (Faulkner et al., 2004). The main purpose of the study is to investigate whether learning skills of kindergarten pupils in English language lessons could be improved through story-based drama activities. The other purpose is to investigate the effect of story-based drama activities on the permanence of the language items learnt in English language course. For these purposes, the following questions are raised: 1. How do stories and drama activities foster creativity in kindergarten class? 2. What are the effective strategies for promoting creativity in teaching English to young learners? This study is a qualitative research. Interviews, audio recordings and video recordings are used in the present study. The participants are kindergarten pupils at the age of 5-6, who are enrolled a kindergarten in Isparta, Turkey. All of the participants are non-native speakers of English. The participants are selected through convenient sampling (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2007). Semi-structured interviews, which are in Turkish, are carried out with the kindergarten teacher. Video recordings of the lessons held by the researcher (Author 2) are also used as data collection instruments. This study suggests some changes in the way to teach English in Turkish kindergartens and the role of teachers in the teaching process. Keywords: story-based drama, creativity, teaching English to young learners, English as a foreign language, teaching English in Turkey.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3408