Activity: "Toning" 

 

Description: This is a strategy used to help bring out ELL students’ personalities when speaking the English language. It is intended to be the starting point for beginning to read drama or fiction. The teacher chooses a few lines from the dialogue of a play or from a story the class has been exposed to. Then, the teacher assigns different tones for each line of the text. Students would read and reread the lines changing the tone each time. For example:

 

DON BERNARDO:

“I'm sorry, boys. You're both good men, but I want to be honest with you. I will never allow my Blanca to marry.” (106)

Tones: happy, worried, angry

 

PACO:

“You can't mean that!” (106)

​Tones: disappointed, shocked, excited

 

Rationale: I originally discovered this activity last semester as a part of my independent journal assignment in my EDCI 305B Drama II course. I loved the concept of this toning strategy the first time I learned about it and remembered it when preparing for this assignment, which tells me that it is something I really will use in my classroom. In high school, I took Spanish courses and know how easy it is to read a second language in a monotone manner. I think that this strategy allows ELL learners to practice how to use different intonations in a meaningful way. It is meaningful because the content of the text is familiar to the students and there is social interaction among peers. Toning exercises could easily be done one-on-one in isolation with specialized support staff, but then it is not meaningful for the English language learner. As we've learned in EDCI 457, intonation is what makes a language act as music to the ears. It is important that we have our ELL students meaningfully practice the music of the English language so that they can be understood by the native speakers around them.

 

Implementation & Adaptability: This strategy could be used in primary or intermediate grades. It would connect to drama PLOs as well as oral language PLO’s in Language Arts. It is an activity that all students could participate in and benefit from. It is adaptable because the content of the lines could be created based off of what is being learned in the classroom. For example, teachers could create a conversation between key historical figures in the B.C. Cariboo Gold Rush, or a simple conversation between two friends deciding on how to divide the basket of apples between themselves. An extension is that the ELL student(s), in addition to the other students, could create their own lines to practice constructing a proper dialogue in the English language.

 

Credibility of Source: This strategy is outlined in the scholarly, peer-reviewed article Acting Out: Using Drama with English Learners by Penny Bernal. Bernal is an English Language Development (ELD) teacher who first used this strategy in her Master’s TESOL practicum. I believe that her experience and the fact that her article has been deemed scholarly makes her a credible source. 

 

Reference: 

 

Bernal, P. (2007). Acting out: Using drama with English language learners. The

English Journal, 96(3). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/30047290?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents