parts, such as pronunciation, speaking and listening. The grammar- and vocabulary-heavy curriculum and examinations mean that the students rarely have the chance to practice communicating with each other in English in the classroom.
According to Kayi (2006, 5), foreign language teacher should pay much attention to teaching speaking because “the ability to communicate in a foreign language clearly and efficiently contributes to the success of the learner in school and success later in every phase of life”. Instead of leading students to purely learn by memorization, language teachers should provide a rich environment for the students, where meaningful communication can take place.
The term to denote one’s competency in speaking a language is aptly named speaking competence. Speaking competence is one’s skills, knowledge, and motivation to speak to anyone in any context. For example, you may speak differently in front of an audience during a presentation than with your fellow students or coworkers in a normal conversation. To develop these speaking competences, it is important to teach and encourage verbal communication.
To improve the speaking competences of Vietnamese students in English, and to increase their experience of speaking the language, this study uses a well-established methodology, known as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). CLT is “a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom”
(Richards 2006, 1). The purpose of the communicative approach1 is to communicate with other people in a classroom and later in a society. Among the CLT methods, drama is the one that has received much attention and is deemed as the effective in improving speaking competence (Heathcote and Bolton 1994, Kao and O’Neil 1998, Anderson 2010, O’Connor 2010, Nicholson 2011, Winston 2011).
Drama combines both the verbal and the non-verbal elements of communication, all of which are important in a spoken language (Dundar 2013). Holden (1981) defined drama as any activity where the participants portray themselves in a fictional situation, or to portray another person in a fictional situation. Drama provides the opportunity for people to express themselves verbally or physically using their imagination and memory (Sam
1 The communicative approach is the beliefs and theories of language teaching that emphasizes that the goals of language teaching are communicative competence (Richards and Rogers 2001, 159).
1990). Drama is an ideal CLT method because it can be customized to the needs and interests of the students (Huang 2008). Some typical drama activities include warm-ups, role-playing, simulations and performances on stage. These activities and other similar activities can be applied in different ways with different methods.
This study aims to explore whether or not drama can develop the speaking competence of Vietnamese students according to the communicative approach. Since Vietnamese students start learning English as a foreign language at Grade 3, this study will focus on primary school students. Thus, the principal research question in this study is: Can the speaking competence of primary school students in an EFL classroom in Vietnam be improved through drama activities?
To answer the research question about developing the speaking competence of primary school students in Vietnam, this study presents a theoretical background to the study and its methodology, together with results and discussions, in ten chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the study, problem statements, hypotheses and research questions. The state of the research in this field is established in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, the research context, including an overview of Vietnam, the history of the English language in Vietnam and the current situation of teaching and learning this foreign language in Vietnamese primary schools are discussed. Chapter 4 provides a brief overview of CLT in the EFL classroom and its impacts on developing communicative skills, which is further elaborated in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, the drama methods and activities are discussed. This chapter explores in detail the principles, techniques, and benefits of drama methods and activities in developing the foreign languages of primary school 7 explores the relationship between drama, children and CLT, and describes how the integration of drama techniques were developed into the curriculum for the primary school students by the researcher. In Chapter 8, an analysis of the research methods, including the research design, study population, the tools for collecting the data and the statistical formula are presented. The research findings and discussion are then presented in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 brings the dissertation to a conclusion with a review of its contributions and suggestions for further research. The Appendices contain related documents, such as: the tools for the data collection, the questionnaire of attitudes and motivation, proposed drama-based lesson plans, non-drama lesson plans, the script for the performance on the stage, the results of the T-tests and the typescripts for the pre-tests and post-tests.
Drama has been used for language teaching and has been gaining popularity in EFL and ESL classrooms since the 1950s. However, research into the methodologies of drama in language teaching has only started to flourish since the 1980s (Zafeiriadou 2009). Studies have been successfully carried out in all stretches of the world, such as in the U.S.A., Germany, France and Italy. The language of study is mostly English, German or French.
However, the majority of the research today is done in universities and in countries where English is the native language. There are also only a very limited number of studies on the use of drama to teach EFL in primary schools, and no published studies on the use of drama to teach English in Vietnam. The purpose of this thesis is to explore whether or not drama in a foreign language primary school classroom is effective in a rapidly developing Third World country such as Vietnam.
In 1973, Hines stated that drama is “a valuable and valid means of mastering a language”
(Hines 1973, ii). Since then, there have been many other studies that have explored the effectiveness of drama in English language teaching. Various studies have reported that drama has led to improvements in the speaking, reading and writing skills of the participants, as well as in their personal growth, attitudes and motivation, as is demonstrated in the following studies.
When compared to traditional instruction methods or teaching methods, drama was effective in enhancing the communication skills of ESL students and increasing the interest in English in school students. Vitz (1984) compared an eight week drama-based ESL program to a traditional ESL instruction program with regard to the oral drills. The results showed both groups of grade 1-3 students had improvements in their oral English language skills, however the drama group had significantly higher scores in their total verbal output and mean length of utterances than the control group (Vitz 1984). Gomez (2010) studied Spanish-speaking students in a public school in Madrid, Spain. Either drama or traditional instructions were given to two classes from the same year group over a three-week period.
They were examined before and after instruction. T-tests were used to analyze the data in order to examine whether either method was more effective. The results of the study concluded that drama was more effective in teaching English than traditional methods.