Current Issues In Language and Society
|
Volume: 3 Number: 1 Page: 65–81
|
|
|
|
|
Children Constructing Dramatic Contexts
|
|
Peter Millward
|
|
This paper will explore the ways in which a group of children and their teacher use their knowledge of language to create a make-believe context. It will show how the participants collaborate to construct
dramatic experience and how through their use of language they describe their relationships, roles and situations. The participants contributions to the discourse will be seen to present the everyday context
of teachers and children doing drama whilst also serving to make visible the dramatic context of the strangers, guides and priests. The data are from a piece of drama in which the participants wait for
an event to occur. This piece has been selected to indicate the ways in which all dramatic situations are managed. If the managed quality of experience can be seen in the participants presentation of a
waiting time (a gap in a narrative and a pause in the production of events), then it seems reasonable to expect this quality to be a feature of all make-believe and dramatic contexts. Even a period of desultory
waiting has to be carefully managed and presented. It does not just happen as the participants wait to get going again.
Full text PDF
|
