Oral language development through drama: Practitioner needs and perspectives

To be effective, an intervention needs to be endorsed by the teachers who implement it. This poses a challenge when it comes to an intervention delivered through the medium of drama, since not all teachers are comfortable with and trained in using drama-based activities in their classroom. Contributing to the development of a large-scale drama-based oral language intervention, this project aims to explore primary school teachers’ views on the use of drama. It involved the administration of two focus groups with 12 practitioners (N=4 in England, N=8 around the world). During the focus groups, the participants shared their practices and beliefs concerning the use of drama-based activities for oral language development and identified the needs and challenges they experience as they endeavour to incorporate drama into their teaching. The project furthered our understanding of how teachers perceive the potential impact of drama-based activities on students’ oral language skills and overall academic performance, and what are the classroom-level, school-level and wider-level constraints they face when attempting to implement creative pedagogies.