From Language Teacher to Drama Queen: Training Teachers to Implement Improvisational Drama into the Foreign Language Classroom

In Dutch secondary school foreign language (FL) classrooms, pupils seldom speak the FL, citing anxiety as a primary factor (Haijma, 2013), and teachers generally tend to focus on grammar, despite greater engagement evidenced in communication-oriented classrooms (West & Verspoor, 2016). That an FL class can become a place where pupils participate eagerly and speak fearlessly can therefore seem the stuff of fantasy—perhaps because it is. Improvisational drama techniques propel pupils into a fictional world while at the same time stimulating them to communicate. Studies from six continents purport the benefits of such activities in FL learning, including decreased speaking anxiety (Galante, 2018) and increased engagement (Atas, 2015). While FL teachers express widespread enthusiasm for drama techniques, they ironically tend not to implement them (Belliveau & Kim, 2013). Seldom researched is the role training can play in galvanizing FL teachers to integrate IDTs into their FL teaching practices. The goal of this design-based study was to discover to what degree a professional development program (PDP) in IDTs can equip FL teachers with the resources and skills to integrate IDTs into their secondary school curricula. English, French, German and Spanish teachers (n = 20) from throughout the Netherlands participated in this ten-month prototype PDP. Participant logbooks, session evaluations and interviews revealed that, regardless of the language taught or previous experience with drama, these teachers were overwhelmingly positive in expressing that the PDP had equipped them with the skills and resources to implement IDTs and as such, promote spoken interaction.