Drama and Children's Writing: a study of the influence of drama on the imaginative writing of primary school children

Abstract

This study sought to discover if drama were a particularly useful tool for developing children's skills in imaginative writing and for motivating them to write. The imaginative writing of children who had experienced drama was compared with that of similar children who had taken part in discussion work. Would the experience of drama help the children to meet the writing task more effectively in areas such as lexis, structure, voice (writing‐in‐role) and expressing ideas and emotions? A series of 20 drama lessons and 20 parallel discussion lessons was devised and taught to two sets of children. At the end of each lesson the children were asked to produce a piece of writing (e.g. a poem, story, report). After close analysis, comparisons were made between the two sets of writing. Overall, in 17 out of 20 sets of writing, the drama group met the set task better or slightly better than the discussion group. Also, the drama group wrote, on average, 24.5% more than the discussion group. Reasons for these results might involve the nature of drama work—here‐and‐now involvement, the role of the teacher and reflection after working in role, for example.

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