Performing the Art of Language Learning
Deepening the Language Learning Experience through Theater and Drama
Dr. Kelly Kingsbury Brunetto
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Performing the Art of Language Learning: Deepening the Language Learning Experience through Theatre and Drama is a work of narrative nonfiction that reveals college students’ experiences of participating in foreign language plays, telling their stories in their own words. This volume gathers the voices of eight undergraduates from a range of backgrounds, from complete novices to seasoned performers, and relates their experiences of auditioning, rehearsing, designing, performing, and working backstage in theatre productions put on as part of their college Spanish and French courses. The students describe how rehearsing and performing in a second language helped them move from intimidation about their proficiency to confidence rooted in the strength of the group’s social bonds. They report how finding creative solutions to production challenges helped deepen their learning and drive their progress.
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The students also recount how liberating it was to memorize existing dialogue and experiment with it while “in role,” as opposed to speaking the target language “as themselves.” Additionally, this book examines how theatre infuses carnivalesque elements into the learning environment: disruption of hierarchy, a greater focus on embodiment, humor, and playfulness, and the use of costumes and disguises. The students vividly express how this more relaxed atmosphere allowed them to lower their inhibitions and enter more fully into their roles, the world of the play and the target language. This volume’s unique focus yields many valuable insights for language professionals interested in exploring theatre’s potential to enhance their students’ language learning experience and their program’s curriculum offerings.
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Truly innovative, Performing the Art of Language Learning delivers an exhaustive account of the role theater can and should play in second language acquisition. Kingsbury-Brunetto makes a compelling case for the integration of the performing arts within foreign language and literature departments. This will surely be an influential study for the advancement of the field.
⎯Florent Masse, Director, L'Avant-Scène, The French Theater Workshop, Princeton University, U.S.A. This is a well-researched and beautifully written text investigating how engagement with theater in courses designed for language acquisition and development can enhance undergraduate university students’ learning. Grounded in Bakhtinian notions regarding discourse practices and Van Lier’s ecological approach to second language acquisition, Professor Kingsbury Brunetto has produced a theory-rich book that also is highly readable and enjoyable. The text is methodologically rigorous and rich in detail concerning students’ understandings and interactions with one another, their faculty members, the plays they enacted, and their audiences. Also included after each chapter are questions for readers’ critical reflection that should produce complex discussions among readers, and especially will be helpful in graduate classes in both second language acquisition and theater. ⎯Mary Louise Gomez, Professor, Languages and Literacies, Teacher Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A |
I find the book very inspiring and valuable. I have been using drama and theatre in language courses for fifteen years and I still continue to expand my comprehension of their enormous potential for learning. Dr.Kingsbury Brunetto’s thoroughly crafted work is a much appreciated addition to my growing understanding of the manifold processes that make the learning happen. We absolutely need research projects like this one to help drama and theatre assume a more central position in the language teaching world.
⎯Barbora Müller Dočkalová, Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic This monograph offers a compelling and methodologically instructive investigation of the “theater practicum” course in undergraduate and graduate foreign language curricula. Beautifully written, well-researched, and theoretically informed yet remarkably accessible, Kingsbury-Brunetto’s work will be valuable to a wide range of readers, including foreign language teachers interested in but new to staging plays with their students and conducting action research on their work, scholars in the fields of drama/theater pedagogy and drama in education, and foreign language teachers, professors, and administrators at the college level who are pursuing, and defending, the ideal of a content-oriented, task based foreign language curriculum that emphasizes learner autonomy. ⎯Dr. Morgan Marcell Koerner, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of German and Russian Studies, The College of Charleston  |