Learning Language Through Literature in Secondary Schools: A Resource Book for Teachers of English

Chapter 3 - Radio Plays

~ CI----IAPTER \J Radio Plays Bob Adamson and Annie Siu-yin Tong INTRODUCTION The power of radio plays to absorb an audience was made strikingly evident about sixty years ago in the United States. A famous actor, Orson Welles, produced a play about a Martian invasion of New York. It was so convincing that many people actually believed that an invasion was taking place, and panicked. Very soon the highways were jammed with cars fleeing the city. In the countryside, people went out with guns hunting for the alien spacecraft. This story encouraged us to use radio plays with our Band 2, Form 2 students. Specifically, there were three reasons why we felt that radio plays could help to improve our listening lessons. The first was to introduce an element of drama into an otherwise fairly dull listening lesson - although we did not want quite so strong a reaction as happened in New York! The radio is actually more powerful than television and films in stimulating the imagination, because people are not spoonfed visual information - they have to create their own images. The second reason was to give a sense of theme to the lesson, which then could be integrated with work in other skills areas. Too often, the listening lesson is isolated and has no connection with the rest of the English course. Third, we thought that by writing our own materials we could concentrate more on teaching listening skills, rather than just testing the students, which we felt had been the practice in the recommended listening book. With TOe, another important motivation for using a radio play emerges - the experience dimension and, in particular, the following learning targets: 34 Bob Adamson and Annie Siu-yin Tong -============== Key Stage 3, Experience Dimension (b): to respond to characters, events and issues in imaginative and other narrative texts through oral, written and performative means, such as: • making predictions and inferences; • making evaluative comments; • explaining one's feelings towards characters and events; • expressing one's reactions to issues; • relating to one's experiences; • putting oneself in the imaginary roles and situations in the story; and • participating in dramatic presentations. These learning targets can stimulate ideas for a range of tasks that can be incorporated in the lesson. Some suggestions are given in the lesson plan later in this chapter. Writing our own materials had the advantage of enabling us to tailor the content to our students' interests in terms of subject matter, location and language. We did not have to be particularly creative, as the play which we wrote, The Ghost oJCheung Sha Wan, was derived from two existing sources. The storyline was very loosely based on a reading passage in a textbook written in the early seventies which we found in a store cupboard. This passage was about an animal that escaped from a local zoo, causing havoc in the neighbourhood. The second source was a television programme, Shoestring, that had once been popular in the United Kingdom. The hero, Eddie Shoestring, was a radio programme presenter who investigated mysteries and crimes. We chose to combine the two: The Ghost ojCheung Sha Wan is the story ofa radio detective investigating some mysterious happenings in a housing estate in Kowloon. LEVEL Once we had decided on the storyline, we drafted the script, bearing in mind our students' language competence. Our students were mainly Band 2, but some were comparatively weak in English. We therefore decided that one aspect of the lesson would be a focus on tenses, as this would provide some consolidation for students who had problems in this area. The nature of the play, with the inclusion of several narrative passages, meant that it was easy to build in this linguistic practice, as it was appropriate to bring out the relationship between tenses and sequences ofevents. We decided that a useful construction to practise would be 'I was [doing something] when [something happened]' , so the script has a number of examples of this structure. After paying attention to the linguistic focus, we then thought about the listening skills that we wanted to practise. For this, we referred to Penny Ur's book, Teaching Listening Comprehension (Cambridge University Press, 1984). =======================- Radio Plays 35 We wanted to have a variety of activities for the students so as to maintain their interest, and for these to be contextualized, thus allowing realistic communicative development. It was necessary to alter the draft of...