ELABORATING TEACHING ENGLISH TO YOUNG LEARNERS COURSES WITH CREATIVE DRAMA: ALTERNATIVES FOR PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS

Abstract

The aim of this study is to teach creative drama techniques to Amasya University English Language Teaching Department students in the scope of Young Learners courses, enrich students’ vision to perform different activities in practicum practices and observe its contributions to the course process. Four stages of creative drama, namely warm-up/relaxation activities, games, improvisation and evaluation were included in this research and supported as a project by the Scientific Research Commission of Amasya University. In this research the scale of attitudes towards creative drama, consisting of 50 items was adapted and used as a highlighting part of ‘‘Teaching English to Young Learners’’ course. As a method, namely qualitative research referring to both descriptive and phenomenological researches was used in the study. Moreover, to support the results of qualitative ones, the quantitative statistics of One-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test for Paired Samples were applied to the collected data. Related to the obtained results, it was clearly seen that the teaching English to young learners courses should be enriched with creative drama activities in the process of teacher training and the prospective teachers need to be fostered using this kind of practices during their faculty education.