Space of Learning: The Application of Phenomenography and Drama in Chinese as a Second Language Learning

Abstract

<p>In the past decade, “drama in education” pedagogy has been widely used to facilitate students’ learning of Chinese as a second language in Hong Kong. It has been found that this pedagogy helps to enhance significantly their language proficiency and learning motivation. This chapter will apply phenomenography in order to examine why “drama in education” pedagogy is effective, how it develops and transforms the students’ way of seeing the language and the learning content, and to discern how variant and invariant processes work during the learning process. The playfulness and increased freedom of choice provided by “drama in education” pedagogy has been seen to open up spaces for learning and thinking, extend the imagination and so stimulate higher levels of text, sentence and question generation that stretch beyond a straightforward learning of vocabulary. Suggestions will be given to teachers and practitioners to help them apply the pedagogy as part of their daily CSL classroom teaching.</p>