The effects of using English drama on the learning of target expressions for primary school students

There is an abundance of literature readily available on the affective benefits that English drama can offer in L2 learning and how to use it in the language classroom (Davies, 1990; Kim, 1998; Park, 2011). However, there is a lack of studies which investigated the direct effects of English drama on the learning of target expressions and structures. The present study intends to address this lack. Forty nine primary school students participated in English drama class for 8 weeks. The results of Post-test I demonstrated that English drama was an effective aid for participants to learn the expressions that appeared in the play. In Posttest II, the participants were found to be able to utilize the learned expressions in new situations half of the times. They depended heavily upon formulaic speech (Ellis, 1994) rather than creative speech, producing either a perfect sentence or nothing. In this paper, we researchers gave this the term, 'All-or-nothing phenomenon'. Additional important findings include male students' superiority over female students in the retrieval of expressions gleaned from the roles of others. However, female students were better in remembering and using their own lines rather than their counterparts, when given new situations.