Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This report presents a creative drama activity utilizing a Japanese legend "Yamata no Orochi" in an adult education class and its findings from the viewpoint of fostering of plurilingual and pluricultural competence guided by Byram's model and FREPA.

Paper long abstract:

This report presents a creative drama activity utilizing a Japanese legend "Yamata no Orochi" in an adult education class and its findings from the viewpoint of fostering of plurilingual and pluricultural competence.

During this activity the learners encounter the world of Japanese myth and experience the worldview contained in the story from the inside through drama works (Watanabe 2014) . Inspired by this and based on their textual understanding, the learners then create and perform their own story, while discussing verbal and nonverbal expressions in both German and Japanese, and if necessary, recieving support from the teacher applying techniques of Psychodramaturgie Linguistique (Dufeu 2003) .

Opposite to other types of drama activities in which learners play a skits written all by themselves or perform a given Japanese theater after the native speaker model, the creative drama activity provides a device for collaborative and expressive experiences, as the learners move back and forth between fiction and reality, languages and cultures of their own and others. Watabe (2016) argues that such dynamic, embodied learning experience go beyond solely cognitive and rather static understanding and foster the ability to understand and co-exist with other cultures.

In this presentation, I examine if/how the creative drama brought about learners' discoveries and changes in awareness in regard to cultures and languages on the basis of classroom observations, reflections on teaching and learner interviews, guided by Byram's model (2015) of pluricultural competence for citizenship education in Europe and FREPA (Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures).