All’s well when pupils act out Shakespeare
The grammar school boy from Stratford-upon-Avon has landed a scholarly punch after ground-breaking research showed that Shakespeare does benefit children’s literacy and emotional development. But only if you act him out.
A study found that a “rehearsal room” approach to teaching Shakespeare broadened children’s vocabulary and the complexity of their writing as well as their emotional literacy.
“The research shows that the way actors work makes a big difference to the way children use language and also how they think about themselves,” Jacqui O’Hanlon of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which commissioned the study, said. Allowing children to “use their whole bodies to bring [the text] to life and to make choices about character motivation” had long been thought to improve literacy but now the research supported it, she added.
The randomised control trial involved hundreds of year 5 pupils – aged nine and ten – at 45 state primary schools that had not been “previously exposed to RSC pedagogy”, and with above average eligibility for free school meals. They were split into target and control groups and asked to write, for example, a message in a bottle as Ferdinand after the shipwreck in The Tempest. The target group was given a 30-minute drama-based activity to accompany the passage.
The peer-reviewed results showed that the target group of pupils drew on a wider vocabulary, used words “classed as more sophisticated or rarer”, and wrote at greater length. They also “appear to be more comfortable writing in role… while [control] pupils imagine how they themselves would react to being shipwrecked, [target] children put themselves in the shoes of a literary character and express that character’s emotion.”
The Time to Act study, which is published this week, also found that while control pupils relied on “desert island clichés” such as palm trees, target pupils were “more expressive [giving] a broader picture of the sky, the sea and the atmospheric conditions.”
O’Hanlon, the RSC’s director of creative learning, said she had been most surprised by the “emotional literacy that was evident in the [target] children’s writing” and that they were “more resilient in their writing, more hopeful.”
She added: “The emotional understanding was very evident and it is probably related to the [rehearsal room process] where you are used to trying to imaged your way through. They were comfortable in describing different emotional states and part of what you do in drama is put yourself in different shoes. ” The study, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, showed the importance of embedding the arts in education, she said.
But could the results be replicated with any old playwright?
O’Hanlon said more research would be needed but suggested that Shakespeare’s use of 20,000 words, compared with the everyday 2,000 words, gave a “massive explanation of language into children’s lives”, which was combined with children “using their whole bodies to bring words to life”.
She added: “The reason we are performing Shakespeare’s work 400 years on is that there are so many different choices to make about character motivation, the meanings of different kinds of speeches, the setting.
“Shakespeare is great at asking you the questions. He doesn’t give you the answers and that’s why it’s such an interesting and creative body of work to explore. And what children tell us is that they love the fact that their opinions count.”
published by The Times, Feb 22nd 2024
David Sanderson, Arts Correspondent
