The World is Your Stage – Consequences of Using Drama Activities for EFL/ESL Learners’ Literacy Development

Sammanfattning: Drama activities in the classroom are highly encouraged in the teaching world. However, they are rarely implemented, from our experience, despite being a crucial aspect of students’ education as mentioned in the National Swedish curriculum. Therefore, we felt a need to direct our research on this topic. Based on eight different studies, this paper explores the possible effects and underlying learning theories of different drama activities in EFL/ESL education on primary students’ English literacy skills and motivation. The studies were found collaboratively using electronic search engines to gather primary sources, including academic papers and studies. They were divided equally between us and summarized individually. The different activities were categorized into “Performance-based” and “Text-based”. Results indicated positive impacts on different literacy skills, such as reading comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, grammar, and also motivation. Activities such as Reader’s Theater, scriptwriting, improvisation, role playing, and hot-seating were proven to be beneficial regarding students’ motivation and literacy development. Although this was not emphasized in our research, in order to successfully implement drama activities in the classroom teachers ought to be knowledgeable in the subject. This paper acknowledges other potential challenges, such as stress for certain students and concerns about noise and chaos. Vast majority of students enjoyed the drama activities, however, those who did not enjoy drama still showed improvement. Different learning theories such as socio-cultural learning, the zone of proximal development and the theory of multiple intelligences were highlighted as being connected to learning through drama activities.