Electronic Village Online 2012

TESOL-Drama presents its 8th annual Electronic Village Online workshop, a free 5-week course for all professionals interested in teaching language through drama. Our theme for 2012 is “Implementing and Evaluating the Facilitation of English Language learning through Drama“.

Registration opens on January 3. A link will be posted here when it’s time!

The workshop runs January 9 – February 12, 2012.

No experience is necessary. There is no cost, and TESOL membership is not required.

TESOL 2012 Drama Sessions

The TESOL-Drama electronic membership group will make its annual face-to-face appearance at the 2012 TESOL Convention in the great city of Philadelphia!

The dramatic highlight will be a full-day pre-convention institute (PCI): Energizing Language Skills Through Process Drama on Tuesday, March 27.

For information about the conference and registration, please visit http://www.tesolconvention.org

We will post other drama-related sessions here when the program is available. We hope to see you in Philly!

Proposal for TESOL 2012 in Philadelphia

We would like to encourage you to think about submitting a drama proposal to the Speech, Pronunciation, Listening Interest Section of TESOL for presentation at the next, 2012 Convention to be held March 29-April 1, 2012, in Philadelphia, PA.

Whether you use drama as a partial activity in your classes or as a way of integrating all the skills through process drama, this is your year! Our year! Please submit a proposal by JUNE 1st, 2011 to the Speech, Pronunciation, Listening Interest Section of TESOL. You do not need to be a TESOL member to submit a proposal.

Please read the Call for Participation carefully. Submissions must be done online by June 1, 2011.

Please, take some time, thought, and extend your creativity with an exciting proposal. The SPL-IS group of readers will be waiting. They will score the proposals and the highest will be chosen for presentation at TESOL…and the more we have entered, the more slots we are given. So give it a try. Let’s make this the year of DRAMA in English Language Teaching and Learning!

Hope to see YOU in Philadelphia!

Gary & Nigel

Ideas for EVO 2012!

As our 2011 Electronic Village Online workshop comes to an end, let’s start planning for 2012! What topics would you like to see us cover? What do you think about assessment in drama? Would you like to help moderate? Please leave a comment here!

Podcasts with Patrice Baldwin

Here are two podcasts that TESOL-Drama member Susan Hillyard made with Patrice Baldwin, President of National Drama UK and IDEA. Thanks, Susan, for sharing with us! You can download the MP3s from:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Week 2 Information

For week 2 (Jan17-23), we are going to discuss the first 10 process drama conventions. Please start by looking at this introduction to process drama conventions (PDF).

The first ten conventions are:

1. Teacher in role.
2. Stranger in role.
3. Mantle of the expert
4. Narration
5. Meetings
6. Interviews
7. Hot seating
8. Improvisation
9. Collective role play
10. Pantomime/movement

Here are some questions we can discuss on the Y!Group list: If you have used any of these in your work, could you tell us how you implemented the activity, how it worked, what the goal was, and how many students were participating?

Pronunciation podcasts

Our colleague Susan Hillyard in Argentina has shared these podcasts she made with Robin Walker, author of Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca (OUP, 2009).

Since I can’t upload MP3 files to WordPress, here are links to download the sound files from MediaFire:

Part 1 (MP3 / Transcript)

Part 2 (MP3 / Transcript)

Week 1: Introductions (Jan 10-16)

Agenda for this week:

• Introduction of moderators and participants.
• A discussion of what process drama is and how it is beneficial to second language acquisition.
• The PD approach is summarized for overall understanding.

This week, please read:

• The EVO Short Guide to Netiquette (link)
• Definition of Process Drama (Word doc)
• 21 Red-Hot Process Drama Tools (Word doc)
• Teaching English through Drama by Gary Carkin (Word Doc)
• ProcessDrama in Second Language Classrooms (PDF)

In addition, please watch these videos:

• Dorothy Heathcote (one of the original proponents of process drama)
• Process Drama workshop from London with Cecily O’Neill

We have checked all the Word documents for viruses, and we are confident all our resources are safe, but if you encounter any difficulties, please email us and we’ll upload them in another format.

Please also check out the links posted on the right of this page!

Your discussion leaders for this week are Gary Carkin and Shin-Mei Kao. We will be talking about these readings and videos on our YahooGroups mailing list. We’d like to hear about:

• your experiences with process drama
• and/or your responses to the readings and videos (especially if you’ve never heard of process drama before!)

To participate, please email evo_drama_2011@yahoogroups.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Electronic Village Online Workshop: “Re-Playing Process Drama”

Join the TESOL-Drama team for another fun-filled, drama-packed online workshop! As part of TESOL’s free Electronic Village Online, we present Re-playing Process Drama. No experience with process drama is necessary, and TESOL membership is not required.

To participate:

1. Please visit our YahooGroup,
2. Click on the blue JOIN THIS GROUP button.
3. If you do not have a Yahoo ID, you will be prompted to create one.

All the discussion will take place using the YahooGroup email list, but many links and files will be posted on this blog. The workshop itself runs from January 10-February 13, 2011.

You can see what we have planned for the workshop by reading the syllabus. Click here for more information about TESOL-Drama and the moderating team.

EVO2011 Syllabus

EVO 2011: Re-Playing Process Drama

The 2011 TESOL-Drama/EVO_Drama online workshop will allow participants to experience the work of Process Drama within a new framework, one especially designed for NEWCOMERS to drama and especially to Process Drama.

TESOL-Drama began looking at process drama in the 2010 workshop. This year, we will approach process drama from the more practical perspective of process drama activities and conventions, and then move to the discussion of how these may be utilized within different contexts.

The workshop will thoroughly examine the techniques and strategies used in forming a process drama, explaining what they are and how they may be implemented, in what contexts they might be used, and through what roles the emerging drama might best be expressed.  We will call upon workshop participants to contribute examples of techniques and strategies that they have found successful and the contexts to which they were applied.

Finally, we will solicit examples of lesson plans that illustrate the use of the strategies in an ongoing fashion and how they were, or could be, utilized to fashion a complete process drama.

Target Audience: All ESOL teachers

Sponsors: SPLIS and TESOL-Drama

Moderators