교육 연극 기법 기반 영미 드라마 수업 모형

A Teaching Model for English and American Drama Based on Educational Drama Techniques

This study provides a teaching model for English and American drama based on educational drama techniques. In this model, a traditional drama canon is used as the text for the course, but instead of covering the entire text, the course mainly deals with selected parts of the text to reduce the text difficulty. The model may have some limitations in that it is just useful for the beginning courses, not being applied to all of the drama courses, but using this model, students will be able to enhance their understanding of drama itself and at the same time their English communicative competence. Compared with poetry and novel, drama is known as a genre which is very profitable for communicative language teaching due to its dialogue form. Despite the advantage of communicative teaching, however, drama has not been used widely for English education. This indicates that drama is no exception to the essential problem of literary education in an EFL setting. Like poetry and novel, drama is basically long and difficult for our students. Besides the problem of the text length and difficulty, drama has also been criticized for its lack of any proper teaching method. Drama classes in college are taught in a similar way as poetry and novel classes, based on close reading and text criticism. In recognition of such criticism, many scholars in Korea since 1990s have tried to teach drama focusing on performance. If drama is basically written for stage performance, drama class should concentrate on stage performance as the final result. But as is well known, performance demands a lot of professional knowledge and training in acting for amateur students. It also demands for students to spend a lot of time and energy in staging performance while studying other subjects in the semester. In this context, a new method, so-called “educational drama” (drama in education, process drama, creative drama) was suggested by Dorothy Heathcote and became popular in drama teaching. In an educational drama class, the text is not given to students. Instead, a concept or a theme is provided for the making of students’ own creative drama. Since drama classes in Korea mostly use drama canon as the text, this study introduces a model that incorporates the drama text with educational drama techniques. This study uses Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as the text for 3rd grade of English major in college for one semester. Since students basically have difficulty understanding the text, key parts of the text are only chosen and the entire plot of the text, instead, is explained by the teacher in role. The point of educational drama is that students make their own drama based on their creative reinterpretation of the selected parts using a variety of educational drama techniques. As a result, students can understand that Dr. Faustus ends in torture and death for the transaction of his soul with Lucifer in return for knowledge and power, but at the same time come to a new understanding of the relationship between Renaissance political structure and theatrical punishment.