1. Multiple Literacies: Beyond the Four skills
Drama as a Bridge to Literacy
Susan Hillyard
ssnhillyard@gmail.com
Abstract
This presentation explores drama, a polysemic discipline, as both a literacy itself and an
effective resource for the teaching of multiple literacies. It argues that drama can bridge
the gap between basic word skills and greater competency in sophisticated literacy
skills. It shows how role adoption and contextualization in drama adhere to a number of
models of effective language teaching and how drama also appeals to different learning
styles. A comparison between improvisation and reading shows that the former is more
effective in developing multi modal skills enabling the development of multiple
literacies leading to learning a language for life.
Key words: Drama, literacies, multimodal skills, polysemic.
Paper
This paper sets out to bridge the chasm between the basic word skills of decoding and
encoding and the interpretation of those marks and sounds into real meaning through
drama. It explores how drama, through its appeal to the five developmental areas of the
learner (social, physical, intellectual, creative and emotional) and to different learning
styles (visual, kinaesthetic and auditory) enables more effective literacy acquisition. It
sees the language teacher as a literacy teacher who is helping students to learn a
language for life and recognizes those students as protagonists in the action. It also
adheres to the notion that literacy contributes to the search for personal identity.
In the beginning was the word and it was only spoken and heard As man developed we
became the only thinking, speaking, writing species and the need to develop these skills
for the further improvement of mankind became essential. So was born literacy: the
ability to deal with words and derive meaning from those little black squiggles we adult
literates enjoy taking for granted. The problem for we teachers is “We live in a wordy
world, trying to cope with concrete kids” Anon
As language educators we need to understand the complexity and interrelationships of
what used to be called The Three Rs, “Reading, Riting and Rithmetic” or literacy and
numeracy to which was added ORACY in the 60s. If we are to understand how to teach
a language then we must surely understand the term literacy as an acquisition process
leading to the discovery of personal identity. We need to find strategies which help
students to learn the language as a Language for Life, as suggested way back in 1975 by
Sir Alan Bullock, in The Bullock Report, conducted by the Department for Education
and Science in Britain. But what is a language for life? What life are we talking about?
Certainly, it would be true to say that the life our students are living today and will be
living in their futures is very different from the life Sir Alan Bullock was living in his
Susan Hillyard – Drama as a Bridge to Literacy

2. time. The literacies our students require are very much more complicated and varied
than they ever have been in the past. With the advent of information technology, the all
pervading power of the media and the influence of globalization leading to the concept
of the knowledge society our students‟ needs have been transformed such that we, in
turn, must transform our teaching. This paper sets out to suggest that we must do far
more than teach the four skills. We must find multiple ways to teach multiple literacies
to students with multiple learning styles. The use of educational drama can provide one
such way.
Most students living in developed societies receive a tremendous input from the
technological word: they listen and watch visual images far more than their forbears
ever did. It is vital that we teachers help them to make meaning out of those
informations by teaching beyond reading, writing, listening and speaking through
moving into visual literacy, computer literacy, spatial literacy, body literacy, film
literacy, music literacy and all the other literacies they are meeting in the life of this and
future centuries.
Literacy has enjoyed a long if varied history. Until the industrial revolution finally
made cheap paper and cheap books available to all classes in industrialized countries in
the mid-nineteenth century, only a small percentage of the population in these countries
were literate. Up until that point, materials associated with literacy were prohibitively
expensive for people other than wealthy individuals and institutions. For example, in
England in 1841, 33% of men and 44% of women signed marriage certificates with
their mark as they were unable to write. Only in 1870 was government-financed public
education made available in England. The existence of secular and religious texts as
well as references to great metaphysical debates including reading and writing contests
in those texts from the Indian subcontinent (South Asia) points to a highly, perhaps
selectively, literate culture there as far back as five to eight thousand years ago. Some
major Hindu texts and other discourses contesting them are supposed to be eight
thousand years old. The large amount of graffiti found at Roman sites such as Pompeii,
shows that at least a large minority of the population would have been literate. In
Islamic edict (or Fatwa), to be literate is an individual religious obligation, not a
privilege given to a few in the society, thus explaining how during the past twelve
centuries Islamic countries have known a comparatively high level of literacy Judaism
places great importance on the study of holy texts, the Tanakh and the Talmud, so in the
Middle Ages male Jews learned to read Hebrew at least. In New England, the literacy
rate was over 50 percent during the first half of the 17th century, and it rose to 70
percent by 1710. By the time of the American Revolution, it was around 90 percent.
This is seen by some as a side effect of the Puritan belief in the importance of Bible
reading. In Wales, the literacy rate rocketed during the 18th century, when Griffith
Jones ran a system of circulating schools, with the aim of enabling everyone to read the
Bible (in Welsh). It is claimed that, in 1750, Wales had the highest literacy rate of any
country in the world. Historically, the literacy rate has also been high in the Lutheran
countries of Northern Europe. Already in the 1686 church law (kyrkolagen) of the
Kingdom of Sweden (which at the time included all of modern Sweden, Finland, and
Estonia) literacy was enforced on the people and a hundred years later, by the end of the
18th century, the literacy rate was close to 100 percent. Even before the 1686 law,
literacy was widespread in Sweden. However, the ability to read did not automatically
imply ability to write, and as late as the 19th century many Swedes, especially women,
Susan Hillyard – Drama as a Bridge to Literacy

3. could not write. This proves even more difficult, because many literary historians
measure literacy rates based on the ability that people had to sign their own names.
What constitutes literacy has changed over the years. It is only relatively recently that
literacy has been seen as desirable at least and essential at most. In addition it is seen as
socially unacceptable if you are illiterate. More recently literacy has become far more
than just “The Three Rs or Reading, „Riting and „Rithmetic and teachers have been
exhorted to raise standards and provide for the new multiple literacies required by the
citizen of the new global world. In Scotland for example, literacy has been defined as:
"The ability to read and write and use numeracy, to handle information, to express ideas
and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as family members, workers,
citizens and lifelong learners." This definition embraces the Social Practice approach to
literacies education and its impact on the "four areas of life" - personal life, family life,
work life, community life and engages the "five core skills" - communication, numeracy,
problem solving, working with others and ICT all competences that are considered to
constitute literacy. We might add such other necessities as visual literacy,
environmental literacy, critical literacy and more if we trouble to analyse the skills now
required to understand the complex world in which we live. The basic premise therefore
rests on the changing face of society in the developed world and how information
technology and the drive towards quality research in education has changed and
expanded our idea of the term literacy. We now recognize that there exist multiple
literacies which demand multiple skills from learners with multiple learning styles.
Many educators today are changing practices of literacy instruction to reflect new
knowledge about teaching and learning. A balanced approach to literacy instruction
combines language and literature-rich activities associated with holistic reading
instruction with the explicit teaching of skills as needed to develop the fluency and
comprehension that proficient readers possess. Such instruction stresses the love of
language, gaining meaning from print, and instruction of phonics in context. The
Balanced Literacy approach to reading instruction incorporates many reading strategies
in order to meet the varying needs of all students. Some of the components of the
approach include phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, reading aloud to
children, independent reading, guided reading, shared reading and literacy centres for
independent practice. A Running Record, a documentation of a child‟s reading
behavior, is often used as an assessment tool to allow teachers to monitor the progress
of students.In some more enlightened establishments drama may even be on the
curriculum. In fact in the Department for Education and Skills (UK) document for the
National Strategy for teaching English (2003) it is clearly stated “Drama develops
thinking, speaking and listening, reading, writing and and critical analysis through
emotional and imaginitive engagement.”
It becomes imperative here to define drama and this is just the place where we
might get stuck. The drama versus theatre debate appears unabated and so we
might venture a vague and all encompassing definition such as “Drama is the
collaborative exploration and analysis of meaning through thhe enactment of
events”, also from the Df ES (2003). Dorothy Heathcote, the leading specialist
who introduced educational drama to the world, starting in the UK in the 60s,
offers this definition: “Drama is anything which involves people in active role-
taking situations in which attitudes, not characters, are the chief concern, lived
Susan Hillyard – Drama as a Bridge to Literacy

4. at life-rate (that is discovery at this moment, not memory-based) and obeying
the natural laws of the medium:
· a willing suspension of disbelief
· agreement to pretence
· employing all past experiences
· employing any conjecture of imagination
to create a living, moving picture of life which aims at surprise and discovery for the
participants rather than for any onlookers.
So let us go back to literacies and see that one such literacy is dramatic literacy. As
drama is polysemic (multiple meanings through multiple signs) it becomes an enabler of
multiple literacies. By using drama techniques the teacher can cope more readily with
placing words in a context to enhance their meanings and allow for different possible
interpretations. This conforms to the horizontal axis of Cummins Four Quadrants for
Language Learning where he advises embedding the language in literature, realia, real
contexts, first hand experiences and moving the learner, both physically and internally,
rather than using the spoken or printed word only. Drama, by its very nature, embeds
the language in role play, improvisation, interpretation of a script or transformation of a
different form of text into a dramatic act. Not only this, but according to Cummins it is
important for language learners to be stretched to employ higher order thinking skills or
as he terms it, more cognitively demanding tasks, and it could be argued that drama in
all its guises pushes students to move out of the arena of lower order thinking skills into
greater heights. Patrice Baldwin (2004) presents new insights into the relationship
between drama and thinking skills, and therefore more sophisticated literacy skills, in
her chart comparing high quality thinking with high quality drama.
In addition Fisher’s Triangle of Language Learning (1998) indicates that it is vital for
students to “perform” in order to develop proficiency. By this he means that students
need to have ample opportunities to use the language and not just understand how it
works in a simply receptive manner. Students need to have a need to use the language in
a variety of near to true life situations especially if they have little exposure to the
language in their reality outside the classroom. Fisher suggests that students must move
from the receptive to the productive where the language joins with thought and the
double process acts as a means towards developing higher order thinking skills and a
higher competence in language proficiency. He also stresses encouraging metacognition
or learning to learn or speech thoughts as a route to greater proficiency and a much
wider range of skills on the part of the student. It seems to be true that most teachers
spend little time on these essential skills, maybe because they do not have a wealth of
suitable tasks to aid them in the implementation of such skills in the school setting or do
not have the facilities and support required from their authorities. The implication for
teachers‟ curriculum planning suggests a new paradigm shift in basic beliefs and
methodology.
Andy Kempe (2000) suggests the soundbite is the medium through which most of our
students receive a great deal of information today. Multi-tasking, zapping, having i-pods
with the capability of storing 10,000 songs compiled by the owner from just as many
CD compilations, snippets of news, e-mail brevity, MSN natter around the world with
interruptions from all and sundry make our students a new breed of learners and so we
must become a new breed of teachers. Drama provides a possibility to see and hear the
Susan Hillyard – Drama as a Bridge to Literacy

5. soundbite in a new reality with its concomitant enrichment of tone, pitch, pace, volume,
and texture of the voice coupled with the body language, facial gesture and stance of the
speaker. This is clearly different from seeing it quoted in print and clearly helps students
to understand and possibly question the soundbites all around them.
We know from studies (particularly of Vygotsky) that reading and writing are multi-
modal activities. The definition of these activities can be compared to the multi modal
nature of dramatic literacy. In support Moffat’s discussion of the differences between
reading narrative and doing drama sheds some considerable light on the advantages of
including drama in the regular curriculum for everybody, not just the talented few. He
stresses the use of personal time, differences in viewpoint, different signs, and use of
events time.
This comparison is furthered through Simons and Quirck‟s analysis of the cueing
systems in reading and dramatic improvisation and the concomitant requirement to
predict the author’s intentions and the actors’ choice of language code and action code.
Role adoption seems to allow for students to put on the mask of security and to air their
private feelings in the public forum in a way that responding to print may not. The
material becomes strangely distanced from the reader and therefore far less threatening.
In this way, when the text is dramatized the student can express real felt emotions
through the “protection” of the role. Connections to perhaps painful prior knowledge or
disturbing events can be realized and better analysed through a cathartic acting out
rather than a straightforward reading.
The response to the dramatic challenge ensures a development in literacy in a more
effective manner than other literacy skills teaching, through focusing on people and
feelings. Dramatic activity is essentially related to the human condition and therefore
touches the learner in a more personal manner resulting in more experimentation with
wider vocabulary, structures and tone, more truth value interaction between speaker and
listener and the practice of the expressive functions of speculation and prediction used
in real life communication acts.
It is clearly noted that weaker language students often excel in drama and, having done
so, go on to improve in other subject areas at a dramatic rate. This is due to the holistic
nature of drama in its power to activate more of the multiple intelligences cited by
Gardner, its appeal to different learning styles, its strength in combining activity on
both sides of the brain and its relationship to play and the basic human need to be
creative and imaginative. As Heathcote(1984) said so many years ago Drama is Life
and Life is Drama illustrating concisely how dramatic literacy contributes to a language
for life and the teaching of multiple literacies.
Susan Hillyard – Drama as a Bridge to Literacy

6. Bibliography
Byron K. 1986. Drama in the English Classroom. Methuen. London
Baldwin P.2004 With Drama in Mind. Network Educational Press, Stafford UK
Cummins J and Swain M. 1986. Bilingualism in Education. Longman UK
Fisher R. 1998. Teaching Children to Think. Stanley Thornes. Newcastle UK
Gardner H. 1983. Frames of Mind Basic Books, Perseus, New York
Heathcote D Ed. Jonson L and O‟Neill Cecily. 1984. Collected Writings on Education
and Drama. NWU Press, Illinois
Kempe A J. 2000 Drama and the Development of Literacy. Article in Nadie Journal
Autumn Issue
Vygotsky L. 1962. Thought and Language. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA
Susan Hillyard – Drama as a Bridge to Literacy