Choreography as a Pedagogical Tool in English-Language Teaching

GAYATHIRI. B, GPS SULTANPET

Highlights:

• Choreography helps create a fearless environment for the students and facilitates language acquisition.
• Learners should interpret a poem in their own way to understand it better.
• Equal opportunities must be presented to the students for them to contribute to the process.

Background and challenges:

I am a teacher of GPS, Sultanpet, handling students of Grade 3. My students hail from conservative families, and they were seen to be quite hyper active in the school.

The reason behind choosing choreography as a pedagogical tool:

After being trained in discourse-oriented pedagogy, I was quite inspired by it and was excited to implement the various discourses in my classroom. One such interesting tool of discourse-oriented pedagogy is the process of choreography.

I chose choreography as a pedagogical tool in order to facilitate easier acquisition of the language by my students. This tool would also allow them to appreciate the theme of a poem and enable them to interpret a poem in their own way as and when the teacher interacts with them.

About choreography:

Choreography is a performance through which the performer(s) brings out certain themes through their act. It is usually done in the form of a drama without employing dialogues and props. Through choreography, students are able to better interpret a poem since they get a deeper understanding of the themes.

Performing choreography in the classroom:

I chose the poem titled ‘The Balloon Man’ to be performed as a choreography exercise. After having taught the poem, I asked a few comprehension questions to the students by showing them the picture of a balloon man with colourful balloons, which is given below:

• What do you see in the picture?
• Who are all there in the picture?

The responses of the students were recorded. Questions of this kind were asked in order to set the foundation of the choreography. Following this, the students identify the characters, locations, actions, and themes pertaining to the poem through interaction. After this was done, the next step was to sequence the actions and assign roles of the characters amongst themselves.

While some students set the scene and performed the choreography along with appropriate actions and expressions, the chorus set the background, and the singers recited the poem.

All the students were given an opportunity to perform in this activity. Through this, they were able to learn how to use language effectively while planning the choreography and interacting amongst themselves.

Way forward:

As choreography is performance-based, my students showed great interest towards it. They were able to understand the poem by performing it. In the near future, I would like to delegate the process to my students so that they can take the ownership of generating ideas for doing the activity.