 Today, I'm going to talk about the use of drama in the language teaching classroom, and in particular about some of the interesting cultural and pedagogical aspects of it. And the first, I will introduce the background of my use of drama in the classroom, and then I will describe the value of drama and suggest why it works and why it's so effective for the language learning. And then, to the main part of this presentation, I will show you some videos, which is not illustrated the process, but also the outcomes, and also themselves or its very valuable documentation. And then I will show you some steps in developing a drama before conclusion. So firstly, about my history of my use of drama teaching. Before I started to teach Japanese at Fuzui University in Taiwan, I had trained to be a Japanese teacher in Japan, both for native Japanese and for learners. But despite my training, I failed, I wasn't able to make the classroom interesting, and also for exercise enjoyable for another four students. And then, when I was asked to create a wrong class, training post-graduate students to be Japanese teacher, I started thinking more deeply about the challenges of how to teach, and how to make learning more enjoyable. So when I started to teach at Tsukuba University in 2000, I started to involve my own teaching style, which is after further development, I called a performance approach. I thought about various issues, such as how to get learners to have a different kind of conversation about what they have learned, and then how to make learning learners feel what they have really achieved something. So in 2001, I started to use drama. I asked the students to use their basic language to create their piece of theater. And then perform it in the classroom, and the result is that they not only enjoyed it, and they learned a lot, and it grows from there. The following year, the drama creation process was further developed, and the number of learners increased, mainly because students heard how effective and found the classroom. So we borrowed the university hall and started to videoing and performances as a record. In turn, all these activities added to the theoretical of the process, which also means to enhance the learners' motivation and learning outcomes. Since this was a new style of learning, at least for the students in Japan, I made a point of regularly asking learners for feedback about how much they learned, and how they feel, and how they enjoyed the classes, and what they feel difficult. So when I was asked to teach the Hokkien course at the Tokyo University of foreign studies, I applied a similar method, and then later also for Solace's Hokkien MA course. This raised new issues because Hokkien, unlike Japanese and Chinese, is less commonly taught language, and I explored even further this direction when I was involved in summer school for kālayu, an endangered language, which I will discuss with her. I borrowed drama into the classroom because the textbook had limited value for learning everyday conversation. My aim was simply to give learners a chance to learn what they like to learn, and to see the students create and perform their own language. In other words, to give them an opportunity to extend their learning outcomes. But I also found a lot of other advantages in using drama-based learning. Many of them are what we now call learner-centered. For example, in developing their drama pieces, learners create their own characters and their own stories. Additionally, they typically do this in group contexts. So they are discussing, negotiating, and using the target language with the other members in their group for meaningful purpose. It's a real kind of real interaction that can happen in the language classroom. Finally, through the drama, they can learn about the language context, about its culture. They can learn how to express emotions, and also pick up some other kind of skills along the way, such as translation. So, oral drama is only one part of my teaching method, which I call the performance approach. It is a centerpiece of the methodology. Using drama in the classroom makes language usage more realistic, and makes the interaction more authentic. How does this happen? It is because drama turns the classroom into a kind of theater. A place for learners to literally demonstrate their language skills through the meaningful scenarios. Drama activities extend from learning vocabulary through the many steps all the way to the final assessment. Providing a holistic learning path. Therefore, and unlike in the many learning situations, what learners do is valid. For example, their story, their performance, their culture exploration, their group negotiations. Also, they focus on resource creation, their story, and their performance. It means that we can even generate additional language learning resources. For example, to begin the drama work, learners watch the previous year's students in order to get a concrete understanding of what they are aiming at. And particularly, for the less commonly told and especially endangered languages, the opportunity to create additional tax resources for the language can be very important. And I'm going to show you some examples of that in the videos. The first one was about a short-edged source during a half-year Hogan MA course in 2007. This video was part of the SETO Foundation. The project aims to document language learning using a drama. The video was shot by Bernard Howard. And this multimedia software was made by David Nathan. And we make all the sessions. So let's have a look. And later videos shot in early class around in Japan and a summer school for Karahim in endangered languages spoken at Lithuania. The first one, I'm going to show you. Students work together, work in a group, using the teamwork. And the language and learning is kind of a social context. So notice that they've got a very kind of a mountain culture group. Let's have a look. Sorry. So it's only a short time because we don't have enough time to present everything. So in the next video you can see the process of the collaborative and the learning, the creativity from the students. So the students are working together, correct each other. This is Hogan. Let's see some cultures. In the next video shows how we can introduce a culture. And here are students learning about the target culture in the content of their story. And I'm there just to answer their question and what they want to know. We don't know. Sorry. Is there anything more that the Chinese could make, the English people could eat? I like the cheese. The cheese. So it can be very traditional, Taiwanese parents and we don't eat beef. Why not? Because cows are used to work. We don't eat beef. So that's also a culture thing. Okay. In the next video you can see that this is a part of a final examination and the performing for the assessment. And you can see that there's a lot of experience about the biology of emotion, angry and surprising and criticism. So which is... This is the first time I've seen you like this. And the next is a teaching book. This is like the 8th training. And drama gives the context to do something like a pronunciation practice in a real context. Let's have a look at this. Yeah, that's it. I like to get feedback from students even in the other videos. So here is the feedback from everyone. But sometimes before the drama, it might be very difficult or confusing or complex. But actually Mark explained how the whole process took length until the time of interesting journey. So let's have a look. That's a lot about this feedback. But the next one is a different set of a drama, a video. And the first one I'm going to show you is Tsukuba in 2004. And you can see here the performance of anger. I don't have time to go through everything but I'll just show you a short one. And also this one is a mountain culture with Japanese, Chinese and Germany and someone from Korea. This is in Borough University Hall. So there's a lot of audience there too. And next one in this video, I will show you some parts of the Kalei Summer School performance. And they perform in front of a whole village community and in the hall. So they're using a lot of props and costumes. So we don't have time to watch it. That's very interesting. In the next video, I'll show you how they recreate a traditional story in a new way, in a new style. And this is very, very important for the Indigenous languages because the recreating system, it can become a new text resources for the future learner or for the language. So let's see if you can guess what sort of traditional story is it. Tsukuba. This is a Cinderella. You can see they like the theater or drama so much. So they pay a lot of time to create everything. And here's a new, they call it Kalei BBC. With news and command. And on for this. But you can see there's a lot of things happened in the drama. And there's a lot of creation and resources. Unfortunately, we don't have time for this. So now I'm going to show you some steps of drama creation. And many people think that the use of drama is more or less the same as a task-based learning approach. However, dramas I have used, it's not only have many benefits, but also involves many detailed steps and provides holistic learning process. Here are some of the steps involved. Firstly, the teachers and the class design the whole activity, including the group size membership and the length of the final performance in the words or meanings. What kind of a story and dialogue content is expected. The assessment method and the timetable. And after this has been established, the class discuss what story are going to present. And each group start a single about story topics. The group formulate and present their story online to get feedback about the story and about the kind of language that is going to be required. Then they start a script writing. After finish their script, they have to present in the class. At this point, the teacher can offer advice about things such as whether or not culture or social aspects are realistic. Notice that depending on the level of students, all of this up till now might be done by their mother tongue. Students then make their translations and check them and their pronunciation with the teacher. The teacher gives detailed feedback. This set normally takes three to five cycles of feedback between the teacher and the group to get right. Once their scripts are ready, I record the whole dialogue for them. This helps them to improve their pronunciation and their intonation. Especially for the things not normally encountered in the classroom, including explaining the emotion and the humor, sarcasm, and so on. Finally, students prepare for the performance of their drama piece. They memorize and rehearse all the lines for the final performance, which is also the overall explanation for the course. We typically make the whole event even more theatrical by inviting a few external people of the student's friends or family. We normally shoot videos as a report for their assessment to give the students as a mentor for their work and an opportunity for further learning. For less commonly told and endangered languages, videos can provide new resources for their future learners. So, come to my conclusion. In conclusion, I hope that I have been able to show you the value of the drama using drama in the language teaching classroom. Giving you some examples and details of how to implement it and explain why it works. I know that the drama is used in a various way by many teachers. But it seems that some kind of thinking, just by adding some kind of a skit to the traditional method, turns them into a communicative classroom. But as I have shown you, the use of drama is much more complex and effective than that. Secondly, I have shown you that drama is a holistic process. It doesn't separate components like pronunciation, vocabulary, writing, listening, translation, and cultural aspects from assessment and from important skills like teamwork. Thirdly, by creating and performing a story and events that make it real by the meaningful context of theory in the classroom, learners get to immerse themselves not only by the target language, but also by the target culture. This may involve celebrating their own culture, in this case of an endangered language. Explore the target culture or learning through the eyes of others in the multi-cultural classroom. So overall, I hope that you agree with me that drama can be very effective for particular language teaching situations such as less commonly taught, minority, and endangered languages, and more generally for rapid learning, especially for real language in use. Thank you.