I am the Ocean. I can’t stay still…I am always trying to reach for the shore. I never give up…no one has discovered every part of me…It’s exciting to swim deep where all the unknown fish live and where all the lost things are: sunken ships and treasure chests…Do not judge me for my color or my superficial shore because I have more to me.

Standing in the spotlight reciting their monologues was transformative for our students. Giving voice to desires, fears, and aspirations over the course of 6 weeks, students toiled to collect information through community-engaged assignments and then developed, wrote, practiced, and, finally, delivered their monologues. On stage, students became empowered to create original pieces of art—unique and individualized projects that inspired language learning experiences while simultaneously encouraging peers to continue their journeys to ideal second language (L2)-selves (Dornyei, 2009).

Lehigh University StepUp Program Background

StepUp Intensive English Program (IEP) integrates language skills in the Speaking and Listening, Reading and Writing, and American Culture and Pragmatics courses. International students bring prior language learning experiences, both positive and negative, and are thrust into a strange environment where they need to quickly develop a new self and a new voice. For many, this can be simultaneously overwhelming, frightening, and exciting. The monologue capstone project allowed instructors to meet students where they were in the language learning process and provide support throughout the curriculum. This whole-person learning experience gave insight into each student’s needs and expectations, which guided instructional choices and created a learning atmosphere that fostered student/teacher trust and bonded students together throughout the project.

The StepUp program aims to give each student the linguistic tools to find their voice in their L2 so that they can become active, successful members of the academic community. At the beginning of StepUp, instructors get to know the students through conversation and low-stakes formative assessments. As is often the case, this class was a diverse group from all walks of life, and students each possessed levels of fluency and cultural awareness that were vastly different. The All the World’s a Stage project helped students discover their voices, script their stories, and develop the final product: a theatrical monologue.

Benefits of Drama in an Intensive English Program

Dramatization allows for creative expression resulting in real communication involving ideas, feelings, appropriateness, and adaptability that lead to pragmatic social interactions (Rieg & Paquette, 2009). Collaboratively, IEP instructors incorporated drama throughout the IEP curriculum. This cyclical learning model enhanced decoding skills, fluency, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, discourse knowledge, and metacognitive thinking, while increasing motivation and reducing anxiety. Gradually, as students engaged in assignments and increased language output, supporting whole-person language learning, the drama project became a therapeutic activity that cultivated self-awareness and self-confidence.

Drama-based curriculum and activities provide English language learners (ELLs) of varied proficiencies with opportunities to interact in the classroom on their own terms and at their own pace. While crafting the monologues, students had the freedom to integrate personal experiences, culture, and beliefs into content, design, and delivery. Moreover, involvement in the community at different stages of the project encouraged positive intercultural representations, enabling students to develop the intercultural competence necessary for successful interactions within the academic community (Byram et al., 2002). While fostering autonomy and ownership, this interactive construct created safe spaces, expanded contextual awareness, and set the stage for active language learning, sustaining motivation, and boosting skill development.

According to Gardner (1999), “The brain learns best when it is dynamically involved in exploring, inquiring, and analyzing” (p. 82). Thus, the IEP curriculum was intentionally designed as an interview-based, self-directed drama project, where students collected information and discussed, wrote, rehearsed, and produced their own performances. In a framework with a variety of community-engaged activities, students explored personal reflections and articulated them in creative and artistic fashion.

Stage 1: Setting the Stage

Drama was introduced early in the curriculum across the StepUp program. Instructors coordinated the curriculum so that students received cyclical support at each stage. The collective end goal of the theater production made everyone stakeholders in the project and encouraged ongoing peer mentoring and support.

Reinforcing the academic writing process, students began the monologue project by journaling and brainstorming topic ideas. To understand the monologue genre, the students researched and read monologue samples, both classic and new; reported on stories they explored in the local community and online; and attended a monologue production at a local theater. Further, students developed research and storytelling skills as they interviewed community members and navigated pragmatic customs in daily interactions, thereby enriching their intercultural communication skills. Responsibility fell on the students to schedule interviews, initiate conversation with interviewees, and seek out personal stories in a friendly, professional manner.

Following the interviews, students presented a report to their classmates, thereby learning strategies to craft an engaging narrative. Next, through instructor-led interviews, students brainstormed to find a character or symbol that represented them personally, and these symbols or characters became the foundation for their monologues.

Writing in character, students developed realistic dialogue, which organically expanded vocabulary and nurtured written voice, making the writing active, interactive, and reflective. Students engaged in the writing process individually and, by the nature of this curriculum’s design, the composing process was collaborative, experiential, and holistic. The scaffolded and multitrait composition supported students throughout the process and allowed for ongoing formative and summative assessment that addressed individual language and writing issues along the way, resulting in improved quality of content.

Stage 2: The Rehearsal

During the second stage, participants selectively used the information they gathered to plan a performance that reflected their linguistic and cultural discoveries. Throughout this stage, students received ongoing feedback and detailed rubrics that evaluated both written and spoken output. Ongoing choice and autonomy over the project enabled students to take ownership and become self-directed researchers and writers.

In the writing class, students revised and edited the monologue drafts. The composition took on styles that were as diverse as the students. Some wrote interior monologues and others dramatic monologues. This writing task was challenging because there was no one model or genre to guide the written structure. Moreover, the composition required attention to audience, organization, thesis, supporting details, and transitions—all elements of academic writing.

Once the monologues were drafted, students began the revisions with self-editing and peer review, which required additional writing skills, heightened fluency, and sociolinguistic competence. As the monologues emerged, students fleshed out their scripts with detailed attention to the speaker and the intended audience, providing listeners with vivid details to understand the context of the monologue and convey the speaker’s feelings, ideas, and emotions. Students’ rhetorical skills improved as they used advanced elements of writing, such as attention to diction, tone, and style. The next step was to convert the written English into spoken text, which required analytical skills and critical thinking.

Simultaneously, in Pragmatics and Culture and Speaking and Listening classes, students improved fluency, prosody, and vocal variety as they rehearsed and refined their monologues first in pairs and later on stage. With this additional focus on suprasegmentals, students recognized the nuances in their speech, adding emphasis to deepen the meaning. Recording their monologues and writing self-reflective journals helped them become autonomous learner-performers, and soliciting and providing peer feedback successfully turned the classrooms into workshops where all students felt safe and valued.

Stage 3: Showtime—Lights, Camera, Action!

The third stage of the project focused on weaving individual pieces together to create a wholesome, engaging production. This collaborative process of artistic creation further supported the development of students’ pragmatic awareness as they engaged in a wide range of authentic communication tasks. Students took on various roles as stagehands, set designers, ushers, announcers, and so on. Planning the final details of the production mirrored the heightened excitement and tension of a real-life theater production, requiring negotiation, cooperation, and compromise.

Once individual drafts were finalized, students received additional public speaking and stage coaching by professional actors from a local theater. As a fringe benefit of this community collaboration, the students improved email communication skills as they were tasked with inviting the actors to classes and sending thank you messages and other follow-up correspondence. Frequently challenged by the coaches, language learners gained experience responding to feedback and defending their ideas with assertive yet appropriate voice, further increasing communicative confidence. As students discussed the order of individual monologues and transitions between them in the final production, they analyzed the audience and engaged in authentic negotiations, further perfecting their ability to compromise across cultures and adapt to various communication styles. Finally, while designing a playbill in the writing class, students utilized multimodal composition and practiced making informed rhetorical choices.

Conclusion

I am a kite. I have crashed to the ground, got stuck between power lines, and banged into buildings many times. I have known heartbreak, disappointment, loneliness, and loss. But I have never lost hope. I love to fly. The winds of life change my direction, but I find the way. I direct my life, and I move forward.

Watching the final performance, something magical occurred: Like butterflies emerging from chrysalides, students transformed from reluctant and self-conscious speakers into confident, skillful presenters empowered by perseverance. Inspired by this process-based drama project, many went on to engage actively in the campus community, eager to share and utilize the power of their newfound voices.

Though this project is highly scaffolded, it also allows for flexibility and multiple adaptations to suit the needs of specific instructional purposes and settings. Modifications may include the following:

• Interviewing members of the community to explore local legends, folklore, and history
• Investigating cultural representations, questions of diversity, challenges faced by representatives of various sociocultural groups, and inspiring success stories
• Using research and/or personal reflections to create an artistic performance that could include monologues, poetry, musical arrangements, and collaborative drama production
• Collaborating with local partners, such as theaters, art galleries, and nonprofit organizations, to facilitate volunteerism and charitable events
• Establishing venues for capstone productions that include community members
• Liaising with the media for effective event coverage and promotion is an additional content goal to further develop students’ networking skills

Creativity is nurtured when it is modeled within the assignments and course design. The endless possibilities of this curriculum give students and instructors the chance to explore unique opportunities and chart their courses in language learning. Ultimately, drama brings forth students’ creativity, individuality, and autonomy, empowering them to step into the spotlight.

References

Byram, M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the intercultural dimension in language teaching: A practical introduction for teachers. Council of Europe.

Dörnyei, Z. (2009). The L2 motivational self-system. Motivation, language identity and the L2 self, 36(3), 9–11.

Gardner, H. (1999). The disciplined mind. Simon & Schuster.

Rieg, S. A., & Paquette, K. R. (2009). Using drama and movement to enhance English language learners’ literacy development. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 36(2), 148–154.

Rita DiFiore, a Hungarian native, earned her MEd in TESOL at DeSales University, Pennsylvania. In addition to teaching international students at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, she freelanced as a diplomatic interpreter and coordinated heritage preservation projects. Currently, she serves as a faculty member at the Institute of English and American Studies of Eszterhazy Karoly Teacher Training University in Eger, Hungary.

Kayla Landers, MA TESOL, teaches undergraduate writing courses, graduate courses, and noncredit intensive English classes at Lehigh University. She has also taught ESL at the American School Foundation in Mexico City, Mexico, and at the community college level.

Mary Newbegin, MEd TESOL, teaches at Lehigh University including courses in graduate writing, speaking and listening, first year composition, and in the Intensive English Program. Her interests include multimodal composition, online learning, and innovative approaches to first year composition.

Elena Reiss holds an MA in TEFL and English literature. She has more than 15 years of experience designing and facilitating courses in mainstream, ESL, and mixed classrooms in the United States and internationally. In her current role at Lehigh University, she focuses on researching and implementing best practices for multimodal L2 instruction, which she regularly presents at TESOL.