Laying Down Pale Memories:Learners Reflecting on Language, Self, and Other in the Middle-School Drama-Languages Classroom

Abstract

This article explores one teacher/researcher’s development of a drama–language unit and the learners’ responses to it. The work is underpinned by a model of intercultural language learning which also acknowledges the pluricultural and plurilingual contexts in which foreign languages are taught in Australia. As part of a participatory-action-research doctoral study, process drama became the basis for planned language-learning experiences undertaken with a class of 12-year-old beginner students of German. Challenges still remain when transferring theories of intercultural language learning to classroom practice, particularly in the face of learner disengagement with school language learning. Therefore, the article enhances understandings of the potential benefits of process drama for middle-school languages pedagogy, particularly in relation to the challenging reciprocal aspect of intercultural work. The article is developed around a Bakhtinian framework of language as referential social practice and demonstrates how the drama–languages model can extend traditional cognitive approaches to pedagogy into physical and affective worlds. The effects of this shift are explored from the perspectives of unit planning, learner engagement with language, the development of cultural referents, and awareness of self and other.