Turkish Teachers'; Opinions about the Use of Drama Method

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to determine how Turkish teachers use the drama method in their classes and what difficulties/problems they experience during their implementations of the drama method. This is a qualitative study. The study employed the case study design. The study group of the current research is comprised of 17 Turkish teachers working in the city of Kars. The participating teachers were selected by using the maximum variation sampling method, one of the purposive sampling methods. In the current study, a semi-structured interview form was used as the data collection tool. The collected data were analyzed by means of the content analysis method. The findings of the current study have revealed that the participating teachers mainly define drama as acting out and empathy development. They use the drama method most in the warm-up and wrap-up sections of the lesson, while studying texts including four basic language skills and didactic and critical texts, theatrical texts, and tales, folktales and fables. The drama method is believed to make its greatest contribution to the development of the skill of establishing empathy and the most important difficulty encountered is related to preparedness of students. The suggestion made by most of the teachers is to make drama a separate course.