Can Drama Techniques Help Students Improve their Speaking Skills?

Abstract

[eng] In the EFL context, there are many methodologies that teachers use in order to foster students’ oral abilities. However, in Spain the oral skills are very often neglected in the EFL class, which prevents students acquiring valuable communicative competences that are essential in the global era. The introduction of activities related to and coming from the field of drama can be a good strategy to enhance student’s oral skills. This paper aims to contribute to the EFL field with an empirical, qualitative and quantitative study. The main purpose of this research is to analyse if different drama techniques applied to the English subject in a high school are positive to improve students speaking skills. The participants of the study were four different groups from three different levels: first of Secondary Education, fourth of Secondary Education, and second of PostObligatory Secondary Education. Two different questionnaires have been done in order to collect information and analyse the results. The results obtained from the questionnaires were manually analysed and compared between each level. Even though this paper represents a very small analysis, from the results, one can say that drama techniques can be a very useful tool for EFL teachers when working on speaking skills.