When we talk about fluency, we often reduce it to speed or accuracy, as if producing English was just a matter of getting the grammar right. But fluency is far more than that. It is the ability to react, to adapt, to navigate the unexpected. Nobody chit-chats in neatly pre-planned IRF-patterns; there is no teacher initiation, learner response and teacher follow-up waiting for us outside the classroom. Real conversations jump, collapse, restart and drift into new directions. The real world just doesn’t offer such niceties.
Learners need to go beyond just processing rules and start acting in a space that is dynamic and unpredictable, where they have to use any tool they have in their arsenal to get the job done.
Drama and improv offer exactly that space. They take learners out of the cocoon of “safe” dialogues: those perfectly edited, polished exchanges that strip spoken language of any spontaneity, and push them gently “into the open sea”. In an improvised role-play, you cannot hide behind a script. You have to listen, gesture, paraphrase, guess, reformulate, raise your eyebrows or your voice, and try again. You start noticing how intonation changes meaning, how a single adverb can shift the tone of an entire sentence, how “lukewarm” is not the same as “toasty,” and why it matters who says what and, more importantly, to whom. Fluency grows in this dance between what you say and how you say it and is far more than just knowing a lot of words: It’s about how you use your limited vocabulary and still manage!
Drama and improv activities naturally build communicative competence as learners go: linguistic, paralinguistic, interpersonal and cultural skills can be experienced, played with and discussed. When learners improvise a visit to the doctor, or a morning commute, or even a simple guessing game, they will run into unforeseen hurdles. The real test of skill is to see how they navigate through them:
They experiment with their voices, bodies and identities. They reflect on how to be clearer, more helpful, more cooperative. They begin to notice pragmatic meanings, those subtle signals that differentiate polite from rude, supportive from dismissive. And they learn these things not because we explained them, but because they tried them. Of course, we should always remember that this is a classroom and, as such, we need to provide ample support and scaffolding. But the mere fact that we can build these scaffolds right into the task without having to spend extensive periods of time to practise and drill them makes them stick just that much more easily.
Drama also gives us the rare opportunity to document and observe fluency as it actually emerges. There is perhaps no better time for a formative assessment than during these moments of genuine talking: we see who hesitates, who dominates, who supports others, who struggles with connectors or intonation. And most importantly, we can use all of these formative assessments to naturally guide and lead the scenarios, adjust them as we go, build scaffolds and dismantle them on the go. We do this through modelling, through prompts, through the simple act of joining in and showing that risk-taking is normal. We are all in the same boat, navigating the rough sea that is communication. When we step into the scene with them, embracing our own inner clown, we show that proficiency grows not from perfection but from the courage to take a step, fall and just keep going as if it was planned all along.
Most importantly, drama lowers the affective filter. The affective filter theory propagates that learners’ willingness to participate and their ability to take in new information greatly depend on their emotional state. Feelings of anxiety and distress can bring learning to a grinding halt. It is therefore of utmost importance that we do not cause scenarios where a mistake breaks the situation but is seen as a “launchpad” that transforms the situation. Someone used a wrong word? Whatever, as long as you get what they mean, just continue. Or better yet, use it and make the scene your own, suddenly going from “a tiny local store” to a “giant mall” – these details matter and can help emphasize where we are and how we act accordingly. Language becomes less about “not making mistakes” and more about communicating meaning.
Throughout literature, learners of all ages report feeling more competent, less anxious and more willing to speak after exposure to drama and improv in English learning. They start performing themselves as users of English long before they feel “ready” – and that performance, that imaginative leap, is precisely what moves them closer to actual fluency.