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Table 2. The Seminarians’ Attitude Related to the Relaxing Atmosphere No.
Statements SA
A D
SD
2. I enjoy learning English through
drama performance. 86
14 -
-
The positive power of drama toward the Papuan seminarians’ feeling in learning English is shown by the statement that Papuan seminarians enjoy
learning English through drama performance. Six of seven Papuan seminarians at St. Paul House of Spiritual Formation state that they strongly agree to the
statement, while one student states that he agrees to the statement. For these findings, it can be concluded that Papuan seminarians feel a
relaxing atmosphere in learning English through drama performance. This relaxing atmosphere leads them to enjoy the learning process. By enjoying the
learning process, the Papuan seminarians can learn English better.
3. Drama Performance Facilitates Papuan Seminarians in Utilizing Their
Kinesthetic and Auditory Ability to Learn English Creatively
The most observable aspect in drama is that every student who plays drama has the opportunity to move and speak out loud. This opportunity is closely linked
to Ignatian Pedagogy as stated by Kolvenbach 2005. Ignatian Pedagogy associates best way to engage learners as whole persons in the teaching and
learning process through the experience of the students. In this context, Papuan seminarians have the experience to move fast and speak out loud. Thus, the
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teacher can use drama because it enables students to use their kinesthetic and auditory ability to learn English creatively.
Pantomime is one example of drama performance which is done in “Jayanti Formative English 2014”. Pantomime is used as a technique since it
emphasizes the physical response. As stated by Brauer 2002 that pantomime provides five benefits for language learning. One of them is that pantomime
integrates new vocabulary for the students. The students indirectly learn English vocabularies because through pantomime students develop their ability to listen
and identify English words and sentences spoken by the narrators. To
meet the advantages of applying with Papuan seminarians’
vocabularies, there is a study conducted through questionnaire items. The statements in the questionnaire items are related to English vocabularies and
structures. The findings of the questionnaire items are showed in the following table.
Table 3. The Seminarians’ Attitude Related to English Vocabularies and Structures
No. Statements
SA A
D SD
3. Through drama performance I
am able to remember a lot of new English vocabularies.
29 57
14 -
4. Drama performance facilitates
me to remember the structure of English sentences.
57 29
14 -
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Based on the study conducted through questionnaire items, six of seven Papuan seminarians decide to support the two statements by choosing to strongly
agree and agree. In contrast, one student chooses to disagree to the statement. The positive result also found in the statement that drama performance helps Papuan
seminarians remember the structure of English sentences. Six of seven students also state their agreement by positioning themselves to agree and strongly agree.
Meanwhile, one other student disagrees to the statement. In short, it can be concluded that through drama performance Papuan seminarians are able to
remember a lot of English vocabularies and English sentence structure. Further, Brauer 2002 explains that movement and gesture are the
beginning of communication. Gesture starts as random movement and ends as precise symbol which can be the starting step of writing. Therefore, the English
pantomime which is dealing with gesture or movements can be used as a starting point to communicate to others. Also, English pantomime can be one step to start
writing English words as the interpretations of the English words or sentences. Based on the writer’s experience, the pantomime used in “Jayanti
Formative English 2014”, is narrative pantomime. This narrative pantomime is done by placing a seminarian as a narrator, while the others listen to the story and
express the story by making movements. The pantomime is started to be taught on the second week of the course. Indeed, it was difficult to teach pantomime to the
Papuan seminarians for the first time. Mostly the difficulties were related to concentration and memory of the students since this drama deals with the ability
to listen, analyze, and move. Sometimes the seminarians forget the meaning of the
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sentence spoken by the narrator. However, after practicing, it turned out that pantomime was a great chance for them to sharpen their listening skills which also
involved their bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. It is worth noting that Papuan seminarians at St. Paul House of Spiritual
Formation have the opportunity to speak out loud through the story telling drama. The story telling drama which was one of the techniques done in the program
“Jayanti Formative English 2014” was based on the narrative stories taken from Aesop. This story telling drama was a new arrangement of one of the narrative
stories which was organized in dialogues or scripts. This story telling drama also involved the students’ creativity because they should take a part the scripts writer.
Thus, instead of being the actors of the drama, which means the Papuan seminarians practiced their listening and speaking skills, they also practice their
reading and writing skills through writing the drama scripts. Bruner 1986 as cited in Brauer 2002 explains that human beings
actively create their own models related to their capacity to acquire language, the objective reality of the real world, the culture in which they are immersed. In
other words, knowledge is constructed by each learner. Therefore, in this context, Papuan seminarians construct their knowledge express their understanding toward
English learning through practicing some activities in drama performance such as gesturing English stories and drama script, speaking and pronouncing English
words, and finally write English words and sentences.
