This article first appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 1, pgs. 115–142. Subscribers can access issues here. Only TESOL members may subscribe. To become a member of TESOL, please click here, and to purchase articles, please visit Wiley-Blackwell. © TESOL International Association.

Video Abstract

When beginning to learn a new language, most second language (L2) learners hope to achieve advanced speaking ability. To help learners reach this goal, it is essential for teachers to provide explicit instruction with a focus on the development of L2 oral fluency (henceforth L2 fluency) and pronunciation (Wood, 2001). This is most obviously the case in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, but is also true in English as a second language (ESL) contexts, where extensive interactions in English are not readily available to many learners (Derwing, Munro, & Thomson, 2008; Ranta & Meckelborg, 2013).

Despite their importance, L2 fluency and pronunciation are often neglected in language classrooms. This is in part due to the fact that many teachers do not understand how best to promote their development (Foote, Holtby, & Derwing, 2011; Rossiter, Derwing, Manimtim, & Thomson, 2010; Wood, 2004). Furthermore, teachers' reliance on commercial materials is unhelpful because classroom texts typically give inadequate attention to these aspects of oral proficiency (Diepenbroek & Derwing, 2013).

One promising classroom strategy for promoting the development of L2 fluency and pronunciation is to use techniques borrowed from drama and theater, which can provide learners with extensive speaking practice. To date, only a limited body of research has focused on how such techniques can impact oral communication (Coleman, 2005; Gill, 2013; Kao, 1994; Stern, 1980; Stinson & Freebody, 2006). In addition, extant research has not been framed in terms of which particular dimensions of oral communication might be most affected by drama and theater techniques (e.g., fluency, pronunciation), but instead has only reported the impact of such instruction on global oral proficiency. Consequently, more fine-grained analyses of how drama and theater techniques promote the development of specific dimensions of oral communication are needed.

In this article, we report findings from a study in which we examined how a drama-based EFL program impacts three dimensions of oral communication: fluency, comprehensibility, and accent, which are widely accepted as important correlates of oral proficiency (for an overview, see Derwing & Munro, 2005, 2014). In addition to addressing the impact of explicit instruction on these three dimensions of speaking, we investigated whether drama-based instructional intervention affects L2 speech in task-specific ways—that is, does the efficacy of instruction depend on the type of speech learners are producing? Research investigating fluency typically uses picture story narration, dialogue, and monologue tasks to elicit speech samples (Derwing et al., 2008). In contrast, research investigating pronunciation most often employs reading tasks to elicit speech, although elicited imitation, picture narration, and short discussion tasks have also been used (Thomson & Derwing, 2015). In the current study, we employed five different tasks: a first person picture narration, a third person picture narration, a video narration, a role-play, and a monologue. Together, these tasks were used to elicit a variety of extemporaneous speech samples in order to obtain a broader representation of learners' abilities (Ejzenberg, 2000; Rossiter et al., 2010). Further details are provided in the Methodology section.

This article first appeared in TESOL Quarterly, 51, 115–142. For permission to use text from this article, please go to Wiley-Blackwell and click on "Request Permissions" under "Article Tools."
doi: 10.1002/tesq.290