Introduction
Using drama in the classroom for teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) is a very powerful tool with plenty of benefits as it provides situations that promote communicative competence in children. Dramatization in all it's possible variations and Drama project used as in the classroom is a technique which belongs certainly to the Communicative Language Teaching approach (CLT).
Drama works effectively for communicative competence purposes because of:
a) It reproduces genuine communication not only formal and theoretical language. When people speak in every days situations, language is full of hesitations, unfinished sentences, repetitions, etc.
b) Emotions are involved in the activities. The student becomes inmediately a more active participant.
c) Non verbal communication gets also involved which is closer to real language.
© Simón Hergueta 2011
