Introduction to Literacy in Drama

This section is focused on literacy in Drama.

The information and resources address the reading and viewing, writing, and creating, and speaking and listening modes across the Drama curriculum. 

Literacy in Drama

Literacy in Drama refers to the literate practices and strategies that enable students to

• listen and speak for particular purposes
• read and view a range of multimodal texts
• use gesture and body language to convey meaning
• write, create, and perform texts to develop and communicate ideas (O’Toole, 2017). 

Literacy is fundamental to the study and performance of drama. Thus, drama “provides opportunities for students to build vocabulary, awareness of language structures, grammatical and syntactical knowledge and builds their capacity to question, debate, challenge and imagine” (ACARA, 2019, p. 3).

Drama-specific vocabulary is learned and developed through

• oral language use
• practical drama activities
• modelling and completion of analytical, reflective, creative, and critical writing (Nicholson, 2010; Pascoe, 2019). 

Drama provides a collaborative way of learning in which students create and express ideas with their peers. They reflect and discuss each other’s work and write and construct texts together (Anderson, 2012). This kind of collaboration fosters communication skills, peer-to-peer learning and creative problem-solving. 

Drama may enable students to understand and represent complex ideas through performance which they may not be able to express through oral or written form alone (Anderson, 2012; Sinclair, 2017).

Literacy in Drama Video: Explained

Jane Bird and Richard Sallis

Literate demands in Drama education

In Drama, students work in two modes and sometimes do so simultaneously

• Receptive mode
• active listening
• viewing multimodal texts, including performances
• reading texts including scripts, reviews, and reflections.
• Productive mode
• speaking and interacting
• performing
• creating texts (ACARA, 2019). 
  

In Drama, students use discipline-specific language to

• discuss and interpret
• analyse, reflect and evaluate
• gesture, create and perform. 
  

When collaborating with others to make and present dramatic works, students use spoken, written, physical and gestural language. They adapt and change their use of language for specific aims and purposes and to suit audiences. These include

• listening to mentors, peers, and teachers
• forming questions and clarify concepts
• making suggestions and contributions
• refining ideas
• giving and taking directions (Pascoe, 2019, p. 77).

Students read, view, and listen to, create, and perform a variety of multimodal texts in Drama, including plays, recorded performances, and live performances (Macintyre, Sallis, Brown & Molyneux, 2017). In Drama, a distinction is made between:

• the performance text—the play as it is performed to an audience
• the written text—the script of the play. 

Students use comprehension skills to make meaning from these texts, and to plan and execute ways to adapt textual material into performances through improvisation, acting, directing and design. Understanding and creating Drama-specific texts requires students to identify and use specific features and structures, for example, the layout and conventions in a play script.

Drama draws on the long traditions of playwriting and theatrical production which include

• Greek tragedy
• Elizabethan plays
• Naturalistic plays
• Epic theatre
• Theatre of the Absurd
• Noh theatre
• Eclectic styles
• contemporary works including those from Australian playwrights. 

Meaning-making through experiential, individual, and group-based learning may be captured and extended through creative writing tasks such as

• writing in role
• mapping narratives
• character descriptions
• script writing (Gardiner & Anderson, 2018; Pascoe, 2019). 

Group-devised performances enable a creative and cyclical practice of scriptwriting through exploring, reflecting, and writing together. Students construct performance texts, constantly moving between the exploration of ideas physically ‘on the floor’ to consolidating these ideas on the page (Bird & Sallis, 2019). 

Literacy in the Victorian Curriculum: Drama

According to the Victorian Curriculum: Drama students

“create, rehearse, perform and respond using the elements and conventions of drama and emerging and existing technologies available to them” (VCAA, n.d., n.p.).

They do so through a combination of exploration and expression of ideas, engaging with drama practices, presenting, and performing and, interpreting and responding (VCAA, n.d.). 

Specific literacy skills embedded in the Victorian Curriculum: Drama include:

• learning drama/theatre specific language and terminology
• interpreting and performing texts
• writing scripts and other narrative forms
• critical analysis
• performing using voice, movement, verbal and non-verbal gestures and technologies to communicate meaning to an audience
• identifying, describing, reflecting, analysing and evaluating their own performance work and that of others through oral discussion and written responses. 
• designing and applying stagecraft, for example, using sound effects (VCAA, n.d.).

In Drama, students “learn to reflect critically on their own experiences and responses and further their aesthetic knowledge and preferences [and] learn with growing sophistication to express and communicate experiences through and about drama” (VCAA, n.d.).