Translanguaging and product-oriented drama: Eight extracts for discourse analysis

Foreign language theatre groups are extra-curricular projects for students aiming to develop their language skills by staging performances of authentic plays. The current study investigated the translanguaging practices of 12 students and a teacher rehearsing a German play as part of a UK university theatre group comprising different European nationalities. Our aim was to understand how these practices can support foreign language and literacy development in the context of a script-based, product-oriented approach to drama. Three group rehearsals were audio-recorded and transcribed. Following identification of translanguaging instances, discourse analysis was applied to extracts selected for their relevance to the research questions. The findings revealed that rehearsals provided a rich learning environment in which participants were affectively engaged, with specific opportunities for contextualised language learning and literacy development. Translanguaging enhanced these learning opportunities, enabling students to engage with the German script and its language as bilinguals, and drawing on both their linguistic and multimodal repertoires to learn. The study concluded that the integration of translanguaging and product-oriented drama offers a linguistically diverse and embodied pedagogical approach to language education, which offers a wealth of learning affordances that are less readily accessed in monolingual environments.