 Okay. Can I... Mwelwch chi, allan nhw. Rydw i'n ddiogel ar y ffordd. Rydw i'n ddweud. Itesh, rydw i ni i'n ddweud. Tysadau i'n ddweudiau, rydw i mi. I mean, mae'r ffordd eithaf. Rydw i ni i ei rydw i nad ydydd yn gweithio mewn ffordd ein bwysig sydd wedi ei wneud. Arweinydd, rydaw i ddweud honno, rwyf ei ddweud â'r Ddramarll interfaenol. Diolch yn dda, ac mae'n rhan oedd ydym yn gwneud i fi eisiau yma. Taeth ar erbyn yr angylwedd, ac y byddwch chi'n dweud yr angylwedd… … ac mae hynny'n ddim yn ddefnyddio a'i gweithio. Mae'n gweithio, ac mae hynny'n ddych yn gweithio ddweud yma. Mae'n ddefnyddio i ddim yn dda... … ac mae'n ddefnyddio i ddim yn gweithio ar y cymhiddiad. Mae'n ddim yn ddweud... … ac mae'n ddyn nhw bod ydympu amser i leoliad... …u gweithio i ddim yn gwneud. Fy enw ydych chi'n gweld sy'n dda chi'n gwybod i'r llunio'r ffordd yma, gallwn i'n amser o'n rhoi'n meddwl a'r hyffordd yn ymwag yn ymddangos ymddangos y taith o'r ffordd, fel oedd yn bwysig, fel y gallwn eisiau'n cychwyn ffyrdd, ond byddwn i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r ffordd, fwy allwn i'n meddwl i'r ffordd a'i eisiau'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r ffordd, is a very powerful tool for the language teacher. I mean, I have first-hand experience of that, as Joe said, as a second language learner of Danish. I would probably say that going to drama college in Denmark was the second best thing I could do in order to improve my Danish. It was a fantastic experience. Obviously, the first, the best thing I did to improve my Danish was having a Danish girlfriend. That's definitely the best thing I could do. We believe in drama, and that's probably why we're here. Also, as a teacher, it's one of the things that I've done when I've got students to put on plays, when I've incorporated drama techniques into my teaching. It's one of those moments when you think, yes, this works, this action works. I can feel that there is something happening here. People are learning something. People are very motivated by this, and it's a very powerful tool. But I disagree with that in that, I mean, when Hamlet said these lines, I'll have grounds more relative than this, the place the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king, he saw the play as a solution to his problem, or as the solution to his problem of finding out whether his uncle murdered his father. So I would not say that putting on a play with your students is the solution. Perhaps the type of the talk should be rather a play is a thing. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, as far as I know Shakespeare didn't use that line in any of his plays. In the course of the day, you will experience a wide, wide range of different drama techniques. Many of those techniques are things that may be part of a project to put on a play, but they're also things that can stand completely independently. This play Hamlet was published in 1603. 17 years before that, there was another writer who was also trying to reproduce authentic dialogue of the time and trying to write motivating material. He was doing it for very, very different purposes, though, not for entertainment, but rather for educational purposes. I'd like to show you a very short extract from that book. The book was written by a Frenchman called Jacques Bellot, and it was published in 1586. Here's a very short extract from the book. It was one of the earliest examples of a coursebook for teaching English, and it was written to teach English to the growing population of refugees, Huguenot refugees who were arriving from France. So it was an ESOL coursebook in 1586, and it consisted almost entirely of dialogues. So as you can see here, on the left-hand side, you've got the English dialogue there. This is more or less how the book begins. It's first thing in the morning. Barbara says, the mother says, Rice quickly, it is time to go to school. Your master will jerk you if you cannot say your lessons. Her son Peter replies, Our master hath no rots, and Barbara, his mother, then replies, I will carry him some. And then, because this is a language teaching book, in the middle there we've got a translation of this for French speakers, so they know exactly what it means, and we've also got a pronunciation guide running down the French speaker so they know how to say the lines. Now we don't know exactly how this material was used, but we can assume that it would be practised by language learners, perhaps it might be memorised by language learners, and perhaps it might be performed. So the idea of using a play as a tool for language teaching is not a new idea. It's been around a long time. In fact, I mean, in 25 centuries of language teaching, it's been suggested that plays have been used since way before this time. Now, I wanted to work a little bit with an example from this text because in many ways, when we work with a dialogue, or a sketch, or a play with students, and it's not their first language, they are encountering the text in a way that you might, in a similar way to the way that you're encountering this text. So I'd like us to sort of, this is a drama day, so I'd like us to sort of engage a little bit with a little bit of drama, and I'd like you to go back in time a little bit to Elizabethan England in London, and I'd like you to find yourselves in a butcher's shop. OK, well, as a vegetarian in a butcher's shop, in a Elizabethan England, OK? Could you just engage with a person next to you, and just decide which one of you is going to be the person who's buying something in the butcher's shop, and which one of you is going to be the butcher? Just decide that as quickly. Don't you understand this? OK? OK, great, now. Um, three. When Mario Green, the new tree, does this technique, it always works, but it never works for me, because if you put your hand up, we could just stop what we're doing. Right, now, so what I'd like you to do is to have that conversation, but I'd like you to do it without any speaking. Presumably, none of you are proficient in Elizabethan English, so I'd like you to do it through mine, if you can. Could you just kind of have that conversation without any speaking, just using mine and gestures? OK, just for a couple of minutes, OK? OK, lovely. I would actually love to just leave that happening, because I don't know what to do with it. I'm pushing with time. Could you just speak to us? Let's just have a chat about what you've been doing. What was the conversation about? Just sort of reflect on the conversation. Again, it would be nice to let that go on, but I'm pushing to do that enough time. So that's just something to sort of get into the topic, to get into the area of the dialogue. We're going to work with a short extract from Jacques Belland's book, Familiar Dialogs, and it's set in a butcher shop, and we're in that polterers shop. So the polterer says, what do you buy? And Ralph, the customer says, show me a couple of good and fat rabbits to which the polterer replies, here be them. Can you see if I stand here by the way? Here be them that be very good and fat. Ralph replies, they be very stale. Truly, they be very new. How sell you them? How much? 10 pence a couple. It is too much. You are too dear. They be not worth so much. They be worth but a groat. Now, I live in Devon, and in many ways there's a lot of similarities there. I find myself almost putting on a Devon accent when I do this dialogue. Okay, so the next stage is, I'd like you to work with the person next to you. Could you just try out the dialogue now? So one of you is the polterer and one of you is Ralph. Just sort of perform the dialogue. I would like to take this a step further and I'd like you to try to actually memorise this dialogue. I'd like you to try and keep it in your head. In a minute I'll take you away and we'll see what you do without the mic. In whichever way you feel it's most appropriate, try and memorise it. Probably isn't enough time for you to do that successfully but I'd just like you to experience trying it out anyway. So could you just try now without the script? We could obviously get somebody to perform that. But we're slightly pressed for time now. I'd like to just move on. Now, what is going to help? What helps in memorising these kind of dialogues? What are the things that are going to help us or help our learners to memorise dialogue if we believe that it's a useful thing to do? Now many of the techniques which actors use in memorising dialogue will be something which we can bring into the language classroom. So sensory channels. The more senses that are involved in accessing the dialogue, the more easy it will be to remember. So some actors write out the lines again. Reading the lines will help. There's a visual element there, just reading and looking at them, writing them out. Also actually saying the lines will help. Personalisation. The more that we can feel we identify with the character, then the easier it will be to remember. Some of you, when you were doing those dialogues, incorporated gesture and physicalisation naturally into it. You know, there's a lot of... Here be them, the rabbits, a lot of movements like that. Noise and noise. By the way, there is a handout that goes with this session and all the references that I mentioned are mentioned on there. Noise and noise did a very interesting study, 2006 I think it was, which looked at the area of physicalisation and learning lines by actors. And they found that when actors tried to learn their lines using a movement or a gesture, it was much easier for them to recall it later. And interestingly, they didn't actually have to do the physical movement at the moment of recall. So the physicalisation actually just helped with the initial contact with the line. Emotional investment. If we feel the annoyance of the polterer at somebody telling him his rabbit to stale, if we can sort of get behind that feeling, we're going to find it easier to remember the dialogue. Actors talk about breaking text down into beats. So each, there might be a particular part of the text, part of the dialogue which has a particular emotion. So breaking that text down into emotional chunks will be a useful strategy. Cues. We often remember our lines because of making a strong link with the line that went before. And I think a lot of accomplished actors, that is what they do. They're not thinking about what their line is. Michael Cain says something interesting about how he takes the line off the other actor's face. So he's looking at the other actor's face and he knows there's some kind of stimulus there that's telling him what his next line is. Actually using prompts. I mean a lot of theatres don't use a prompt and they expect the actor to sort of improvise their way out of a situation. But in the language learning class, a language class, I think a prompt is actually quite a useful thing sometimes to have somebody who's not involved in the dialogue who can give you a little bit of the line and that can serve as a memory trigger to help you remember. And also testing, self-testing, testing yourself constantly on the dialogue. So not thinking that you've learnt it but actually trying to remember it. I mean one of the things I often do when I'm learning lines for a play is just cover up the script and sort of move the piece of paper down so I'm constantly testing myself on what's the next line. Okay, now maybe we should also address this question. Is this a useful thing to do in the language class? Is practising, memorising, performing, dialogue, sketches, plays? Is it a useful language learning activity? In many contexts it has been almost frowned upon because of its sort of links with behaviourism. It's a behaviouristic thing to do. We're telling people what to say. They're not really thinking of the language. In a way it's non-communicative. You're giving people lines and you're making them say them. I think that recently two things have happened which two sort of recent developments in language teaching methodology have a very strong bearing on this. One is the work of people like Michael Lewis who are implementing the lexical approach. Modern analyses of real data suggest that we are much less original in using language than we like to believe. Much of what we say consists of prefabricated multi-word items. So the dialogue, the sketch, the play is a fantastic context in which to present chunks of language and we don't need to necessarily understand the grammar behind those chunks in order to use them. So we can perform a play. We can learn the lines of a script using the present perfect where we're not even completely sure how the present perfect works. But some linguists would suggest that in fact that's how we learn the grammar by building up a repertoire of chunks of language containing that language item. So that's one quite strong argument for using prescripted work. Another is this, I mean people say we're in the post-communicative language teaching era now and a very strong critic of the communicative approach has been Guy Cook in his book Language Play, Language Learning where he says, you know, we've gone too far with this idea that everything has to be meaningful, everything has to be real language use, everything has to be, you know, to communicate an idea. And he emphasises very much the idea of language play, the idea of ritualistic language use and the fact that in fact what is memorable to students is not always the mundane and the meaningful. The bizarre, the silly, the ritualistic is also what we remember. I'm always struck by, when I work with teachers of English from other countries, I'm always struck by how many odd nursery rhymes that they know, that they remember in English or songs or unusual bits of literature that they just know and sometimes those are quite meaningless. So I think this is another argument for using a play-based approach that language, you know, we can use text which doesn't necessarily fit in with the student's world, but they may find it memorable anyway. Now, I would like to just show you a very quick extract of some students doing a dialogue. Now, one thing I have done with students is get them to work over a long period of time on a play and I think that's a fantastic thing to do. I mean, I recently met up with a group of students in Birmingham where we performed a play, you know, I don't know, 15 years ago and we met up sort of five years later and watched the video of the play and it was a very powerful experience for everyone who was involved in that play. So there are a lot of other things going on when we do do a play with students other than the linguistic things of learning the lines. Students have sometimes said to me how useful it is to receive feedback on the way they're performing a play. So they're working on lines and, you know, just having that feedback on the way that they're doing things is a very useful tool. I mean, just to show you what it says about this. The rehearsal and performance in an appropriate play combines the best of both structural and communicative syllabuses, rote learning and repetition of a model, attention to exact wording, practice in all four skills, motivating an authentic language and activity, instances of culturally and contextually appropriate pragmatic use and integration of linguistic with paralinguistic communication. So putting on a play can be a very powerful experience for language learners. We don't always have time to do that. We don't always have the possibility to do that in the context in which we work. But I think just the idea of giving students a dialogue to practice, to memorise and then to perform over a short period of time is also a useful thing to do. So I'd like to show you a short dialogue. Now this dialogue is from drama and improvisation and it's an excellent book. If he isn't going to plug it in his session I'm going to plug it in mine. It contains at the back of the book a range of short dialogues which are in English and are suitable for a range of different levels. I would guess that they could be adapted for different languages. Also on your blog you have a range of dialogues as well for different scripts, don't you? Will you give the address of that in your? Great. Now how do I get out of this? So I'm going to show you this YouTube dialogue. Now this is two primary teachers of English who came on a course in Devon. Their level is not that high in English but they are suddenly thrown into the situation of having to teach English in a primary school that they're not trained as English teachers they're trained as primary teachers and they're suddenly having to teach English. This is happening in lots of countries all over Europe. So what's happened here is they've learnt a very short dialogue. Basically what I did was I gave them the sketch and they kind of memorised it at home and then we spent a little bit of time in class practising it giving each other feedback on their performance and then they performed and other people watched. So just have a look at the dialogue. I hope the sound, the sound is on, is it? Yep, great. So we can you know we can have sort of very black and meaningless reading of the text so I'm not going to experience some of the situation before doing it. I mean that happens, I think that happens as a natural process. I mean it happened here. I don't think that was exactly the dialogue that we started with. I don't think we should be too strict about you know this is exactly right. I mean the thing is I don't think that learners will immediately acquire the language the language is different from the level that they have they're not going to immediately acquire it but I do think it has a slow release effect. If we memorise something it has a slow release effect on our language. It's a very, very interesting experience where I found the script of a play that I performed in Denmark about 20 years ago and I found the script again somebody sent me the script and it was amazing how it came back to me looking back through the script and I could literally remember the movements that we had with certain scenes. I could remember that was when I moved down very much like that you know or I mean we may have a very slow release effect I think we should leave it there because we're already a little bit over time so perhaps if there are any other questions maybe you could ask them afterwards ok thank you very much