Autor: prof. Bogdan Georgiana
Social skills focus on the ability to communicate and interact with each other both verbally and non-verbally, through gestures and body language. When people have good social skills, they also have good relationships with the ones around them, they communicate better in most environments and they are more efficient and even happier.
These social skills can be enhanced through drama-based activities as it is well known that drama builds cooperation and is able to build many other social skills, such as knowing others, making decisions together, identifying and expressing feelings and dealing with mixed emotions, caring about others or deciding on the best solution. Working together as a group encourages cooperation and motivates students even more. Drama offers a new place for students to feel free to work with feelings and emotions. By studying drama, teenagers have the opportunity of understanding the way in which life is explored, experienced and communicated on and off stage. On the other hand, they become familiar to a wide range of characters, ways of dealing with the various challenges of life, various points of view from which a situation can be looked into and they also develop the ability to empathize. As Jonathan Needlands observes in ” Issues in English Teaching”, drama is a ” cultural subject” which can be used to teach pupils different social values and skills.
Students face different problems in their lives, which may be either about mastering a school subject or a social task and it is the teacher’s responsibility to address them as the educational domain requires skills for both academic and social behaviour. This is why teachers need to be informed and aware of the social skills students should develop in school and not only and they must identify the problems that may appear throughout the way. They need to create tasks that refer to these issues and help students overcome a social skill deficit. Using literature is a good tool for teachers who want to explore these aspects in their EFL classroom. As Jonathan Needlands notices, Shakespeare’s plays allow students to take various roles in character and use all senses and characteristics in order to understand the character as well as the play. By learning to explore in different ways and by using different methods, students build a strong character and personality. They are given the opportunity to observe the world from the comfortable position of the audience, they learn how to shape their ideas and they learn how to make sense of their real-life problems. Plays can be used in order to have students work in small or large groups which develop social skills such as team work, goal setting and responsibility. They take part in group discussions, group projects and group games which will help boost their confidence, ease the process of decision-making and improve the relationships among group members.
According to Jeremy Harmer, in How to Teach English (2007) dramatization requires classroom performance of scripted materials. Students can make their own scripts adapting plays as closely as possible to the original text or creating original scripts by themselves. These activities could involve students to work in teams, to negotiate situations and roles in the play, to write the lines and stage directions and to assign the roles to group members. As a result, social skills are to be perfected conducting to their personal development.
Taking everything into account, drama could be very important when it comes to reinforcing students’ social skills, becoming a very important step in learning English as it integrates all the micro-skills ( reading, listening, writing, speaking and use of English) and encouraging them to be more critical and self-aware.
WORKS CITED
Needlands, Jonathan. ” Drama sets you free – or does it?” Issues in English Teaching. Edited by Jon Davison and John Moss. London: Routledge, 2000, pp.73-89.
Jeremy, Harmer, How to Teach English. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2007
