Drama and Language Learning

Abstract: The following degree project has the purpose of shedding some light on the use of drama pedagogy by the teachers in Sweden. The background to the survey is several studies about drama pedagogy for better language understanding. The studies worked with mixed groups of pupils, and all had good results at the end of the studies regarding the pupils’ language use. I believe in drama as a learning tool and my wish was to know more about what teachers in Sweden thought about drama as a method for learning and how common it was to use. In this degree project, there are three research questions that have been answered. These are “Do teachers use drama pedagogy in their classrooms to teach language—and if so, how?”, “What kind of drama exercises do teachers use and how?” and “Why do/do not teachers use drama when teaching language?”. The questionnaire that was written to answer these questions was filled out by a hundred participants, all teachers in different age groups and in different parts of Sweden. The results of the survey show that about one out of five teachers in this test group used drama as a tool for language development. The reasons cited on why they did not use drama varied, but the most prominent was that the teachers did not have enough knowledge about drama to use it in their classrooms. This study is, due to the small number of participants, not generalizable for all teachers in Sweden, but it gives an inside look at how teachers view drama as a language tool.