Pedagogy of Confidence: Integrating Educational Drama and Language in Undergraduate EFL Classes

In a continued effort to achieve an educational vision to foster voices of L2 learners as legitimate and confident language users (Duff, 2014), there has been a steady scholarly interest in L2 pedagogies with a socially-attuned, multi-sensory, and engaging artful learning medium, educational drama (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Stinson & Winston, 2011). Scholars advocate for the pedagogical potential of educational drama in supporting L2 educational spaces where learners have meaning-filled and creative opportunities. In such spaces, students can work with language situated in context in connection with a variety of modalities that create and represent meanings, nurturing competence and confidence in L2 (Galante & Thomson, 2017; Zhang, 2022). While these opportunities can be beneficial for all language learners particularly those in EFL settings, there is little known about how educational drama is used in EFL contexts especially at a tertiary level where a transmission-oriented pedagogy is still influential and teacher voices and that of textbooks often take centre stage (Araki & Raphael, 2018).

This presentation reports on an action research study of an undergraduate English for academic purposes (EAP) class at a university in Japan. Drawing on multiple data sources (e.g., surveys, students’ reflections, student-designed/produced multimodal projects, and critical reflective field notes), the teacher researcher aims to empirically illustrate the impact of educational drama on students’ language and literacy engagement and their sense of identity of confidence as multilingual meaning-makers when it is integrated within conventional textbook-based English-medium undergraduate classes. By illustrating instances of specific drama strategies and students’ multimodal story-telling project, the presentation closes with important implications for L2 educators particularly in EFL contexts who pursue an educational vision of nurturing students’ identities as confident plurilingual meaning-makers while coping with meeting curricular expectations of predominantly print literacy and language-based EAP courses for EFL students in higher education.