role he must play. Dramatizing based on scripts by them would be most helpful. A short drama of the parable of the Good Samaritan, lasting about 10’ and prepared along the year could end up with a performance for the whole school (or several courses) in May. The scripts of the play can be produced by children adapting vocabulary to them or taken from the DVD used in the classroom. This would be ambitious and requires preparation, but could be rewarding for both teacher and children with benefits for them beyond content and language. Before launching the activity, confirmation of performance should be gainen from headship of studies. When it comes to drama and RE we should separate it from typical Christmas festivals. They have pros and cons. They are useful for exploring creativity and enjoyment and benefit from a captive audience. On the other hand, Christmas festivals usually do not develop religious concepts neither key skills. This is why I think dramatization of parables shouldn’t be kept for Christmas but rather for some other moment at the end of the year. Drama should be used within RE lesson and as a way to dive into religious ideas and feelings via other intelligences; there are many techniques to put drama into RE (Webster, 2010). For this reason, we will propose the use of a script by children to perform for other students as a way of going deeper in the understanding of the parable. This will produce incidental learning together with.
4.4 Listening activities According to Barton, listening is “the most difficult skill to master”, specially “for boys, whose aural skills are often inferior to those of girls” (2006:60). It is awkwardly clear through the change from the familiar voice of the teacher to a strange, recorded voice. Differences between spoken and written English are clear (Spratt, Pulverness, & Williams, Melanie, 2005). Children also regard listening a passive and unpurposeful process. We must bear this in mind and in order to minimize it we will use only three different voices for listening activities: teacher’s, online audio bible of the NIV ® available at biblegateway.com or its CD version (International Bible Society, 2001), and a DVD series on the History of Salvation (Monte Tabor Films, 2001). This way, we are reducing the strangeness of voices in the classroom but, at the same time, giving children a variety of accents, intonations and a taste of real pronunciation. Listening of the whole parable should never be done at the beginning of work with a parable; before, and introduction to the topic, vocabulary and characters must have been done in order to prepare them for listening. Also, a full reading and some activities on the parable should be have been completed. Nevertheless, audition of certain verses of the parables (very easily done with the online version) could be effective in introducing new vocabulary. For new words and refining of pronunciation, online version of some dictionaries is also recommendable. There are clear differences in using audios and videos in the classroom for listening activities (Harmer, 2007). Nevertheless, we must take into account that the first source of listening in the classroom is the teacher and we shouldn’t underestimate its potential, and we are so in many informal and sometimes unorganized way. But when it comes to videos we must tend to a structured use, avoiding 36
