Combining foreign, native and national languages through theater in schools: an “enactive approach“ to education. (original) (raw)
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2012
This paper is based on the University Theatre experience at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT) of the University of Bologna (Forli campus) over the last twenty years. A great number of trainee translators and interpreters has had the opportunity to explore the world of theatre in a foreign language, which can be referred to as TiLLiT (i.e. theatre in language and language in theatre) or stage-classroom. This activity has been carried out within a comprehensive educational context, enabling participants to acquire both general and specific competences, as suggested in the European Higher Education Area. Evidence of this can be found in the final dissertations that some students-actors wrote to complete their curriculum. Four dissertations in total will be considered to illustrate the effective action of theatre, which enables its main protagonists to establish a direct link between theoretical notions and experience.
L2 Journal, 2017
The study of foreign languages has historically been a cornerstone in higher education for a variety of very good reasons, one being that it will help students develop a sensitivity to diversity. This rationale is compelling in theory, but requires a practical approach for instruction that actually guides students towards such a learning outcome. Current research (e.g., Byrnes, 2006; Kramsch, 2006; Swaffar, 2006) has argued that the traditional focus on the development of communicative competence often promotes a functional understanding of the target language and dominant cultural values, thereby obscuring examples of linguistic ambiguity, power dynamics, and even cultural diversity. According to Kramsch (2009) these concepts can be highlighted by prioritizing symbolic competence, which is the “...ability to draw on the semiotic diversity afforded by multiple languages to reframe ways of seeing familiar events, create alternative realities, and find an appropriate subject position ‘between languages,’ so to speak” (pp. 200–201). This article discusses why the notion of symbolic competence is so important when teaching foreign language courses at the university level, and explains why theater offers a salient opportunity to engage with semiotic diversity. Specifically, theater allows students to interpret and play with meaning, and in the context of semiotics, students are able to observe, enact, and even dismantle meaning-making devices such as symbolic representation, symbolic action, and symbolic power. This article illustrates classroom activities and examples of student work from an intermediate (200-level) French course, and concludes by discussing the larger implications for foreign language teaching and learning
The elaboration of the rationale proposed here finds its roots in an examination of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) parameters. We are notably interested in highlighting the importance of artistic practice – and in particular of drama performance – in the context of foreign language learning. We are thus proposing here considerations concerned with the estimation of artistic practice as a specific way of teaching and learning foreign languages. Our usual target group consists of Bachelor and Master students interested in learning Italian through drama techniques but whose subject is not primarily Modern Languages (non-specialist students). By proposing a set of standard skills that match CEFR parameters with artistic pedagogy training, we intend to promote valuable criteria for teachers, learners and examiners in order to promote language learning through artistic practice syllabi.
Translanguaging and Language Creativity in Drama Staging
Multilingual education, 2018
This chapter presents a performative approach to translanguaging that draws on and fosters language creativity of bilingual adolescents from mixed French-Russian families living in France. Through staging scenes, the learners interact autonomously in both of their languages and co-create a fictional world. This provides learning situations that allow them to embody meaning: they improvise creatively, mixing all of the repertoires available to them, i.e. verbal, non-verbal, emotional, sensory, cultural and intellectual. The authors outline their theoretical framework, taking up Francisco Varela's enactive perspective, which posits that languaging is a lived, i.e. embodied, dynamic and emergent, experience and they show how their approach includes the features of an enactive teaching method.
At Copenhagen International School of Performing Arts, English is the Lingua Franca (ELF) of artistic exploration. With a non-conformist approach to the use of ELF, highlighting a body-mind insight into the language over correctness, a latent, expressive potential of ELF is explored through a psycho-physical training. The predominant technique is Movement Psychology (Laban/Malmgren), which examines the interdependence between, on the one hand, text, language, and narrative and, on the other, the embodiment of the Jungian unconscious. The paper analyses the process and the methods of staging the production entitled Re: ORESTES, based on Mee's play Orestes 2.0, applying the described methodo-logical exploration. The play was rewritten and remoulded by the performers throughout a rehearsal process, which focused on interlacing the performers' highly diverse cultural horizons (Gadamer) in a common mega-text, in an attempt to fuse the familiar with the alien, the personal with the collective, and to channel, shape and articulate the material within ELF. The paper details two different examples of this transformative remoulding process. One actor wrote a completely new text, which was performed in the heightened style of "the Queen's English". Another actor performed a part in a poly-glottal combination of Ancient and Modern Greek (her mother tongue) and ELF. In this process, both performers sought to transcend the preconceived limitations of their individual cultural horizons as well as of the English language.