DRAMA EDUCATION IN TEACHING OF GERMAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE – AN INVESTIGATION ON THE SELFRATING OF TURKISH STUDENTS

Abstract

This article aims at investigating the use and acceptance of drama pedagogy in teaching and learning German as a foreign language. It also investigates how Turkish students evaluate their own stance in dramapedagogy and the reasons underlying their self-assessment. The empirical study took place at an Anatolian high school in Ankara. For this purpose, three teaching units were prepared to teach German texts with drama pedagogy methods. The survey on "Drama Pedagogy Methods in German as a Foreign Language Teaching - A Study on the Self-Rating of Turkish Students" was conducted in 2014-2015 as a questionnaire, and 85 students who attended the tenth grade participated in the survey. Analysis of the quantitative data shows that the majority of the tasks were completed successfully by the students. The results of the qualitative content analysis indicate that the students consider the use of drama-teaching methods to be positive, that they can learn with fun and better understand the content of the lesson. Especially in the warmup phase they are motivated by the simplicity of the tasks. The results also pointed to some of the limitations of drama-pedagogy methods. The students state that they have difficulties in the course if many unknown words occur and they notice that they cannot cope with the learning activity. Particularly in the drama phase, many students are overwhelmed if their German proficiency is not sufficient for the task. In addition to insufficient German proficiency, the incompetence for improvisation, incorrect pronunciation and intonation are given as reasons for poor performance and for not achieving the tasks. The students react especially critically, if they do not understand the text content or the task and if they cannot understand the meaning and purpose of the task. The results indicated that the majority of the students rate the use of drama teaching methods as motivating. They consider drama pedagogy methods support learning German. According to the students, the drama teaching methods are particularly beneficial Drama pedagogy is a holistic teaching and learning method which uses the resources of the theatre for educational purposes (cf. Tselikas 1999: 21; Schewe 1993: 80; Üstündağ 1998: 29). Drama pedagogy is an effective learning and teaching method, since it improves all dimensions of learning and teaching a foreign language (physical, aesthetic, emotional and cognitive) (cf. Küppers 2015: 145; Schewe & Scott 2003: 60; Schewe 2015: 31; Schmenk 2004: 7; Surkamp & Hallet 2015: 7). This article deals with the use, advantages and limitations of drama pedagogy methods in German as a Foreign Language (GFL). Also this article investigates how Turkish students evaluate their own performance in drama pedagogy with the reasons for their self-assessment. They also evaluate their perceptions towards drama pedagogy methods in GFL courses. The empirical study took place in 2014-2015 in a state high school in Ankara and 85 students who attended the tenth grade participated in the survey. For this purpose, three teaching units are prepared and implemented. These three units are developed based on the three-phase model of Tselikas (1999), taking into account the institutional framework and conditions (eg the equipment and seating arrangement of classrooms, classrooms) and aimed to teach three literary texts which are the poem "Fünfter sein" by Ernst Jandl, the fairy tale "Rotkäppchen" by the brothers Grimm and the fable "Der Wolf und das Lamm" by Jean de la Fontaine. Each teaching unit lasted 80 minutes. The research questions are as follows:  How is the acceptance of drama pedagogy by the students in the GFL course?  Can the Turkish students cope with drama pedagogy tasks and activities in the GFL class?  Is students’ performance in three phases of drama teaching (in the warm-up phase, drama phase and in the cool-down phase) good, mediocre or bad?  Why? What are the reasons for this self-assessment? Why are they good, mediocre or bad?  How can drama pedagogy methods in the GFL class support the students?  Which values are offered by drama pedagogy?  Do drama pedagogy methods provide the students and teachers with meaningful ways to support the development of the four communicative linguistic skills? To investigate the research questions, a mixed method approach was employed in data collection. In order to examine student ratings and opinions on "drama pedagogy methods in GFL teaching", data were collected through the questionnaire "Drama Pedagogy Methods in German as a Foreign Language Teaching - A Study on the Self-Rating of Turkish Students". In order to avoid any misunderstandings that can be caused by students’ language proficiency levels, the questionnaire for self-assessment was prepared in Turkish. The questionnaire consists of three sections. In the first section questions are asked to gather information about participants’ demographic information such as gender and age and German language proficiency. In the second section, the participants are asked questions that evaluate all the implemented drama pedagogy activities in the scale of well (“I can handle the task to a very great extent”), mediocre (“I can manage the task in one way”) and bad (“I can barely handle the task”). Then the participants are requested to explain the reason of their evaluations through an open- ended question. They could provide answers in two or three sentences. These explanations are used as the qualitative data which was then analysed through the use of content analysis. The qualitative data were analyzed by using MaxQDA 11 software. For this purpose, the questionnaires filled out by the students were first written into Word, then the text files were imported into the MaxQDA 11 software. As categories were formed in an inductive way, the results are initially thematically coded and evaluated (see Mayring 2000). The classification and revision of the subcategories took place in a furt