Play Bolsters English Skills
By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
Suwon, Gyeonggi Province ㅡ English plays have been touted as a good means to help non-English speakers improve their English proficiency and gain confidence by speaking the language before an audience. But it has failed to achieve this goal in Korean colleges where audiences are few and far between and performers tend to restrict their speaking to rehearsal time and the plays themselves.
In an attempt to counter this, Kyung Hee University's school of English language and culture staged an experimental yet practical English play dubbed ``Cultural Project #1.''
The play was based on the script ``Big Love'' written by Obie-award winning playwright Charles Mee.
At 3:45 p.m. on Sept. 27, ten student actors and actresses were practicing their lines. The director and other staff members were also busy checking backdrops, lighting, music and props.
``We have only fifteen minutes. Hurry up guys,'' stage director Kim Jin-hyung, a sophomore at the school's college of art, shouts in English.
There were no professors and supervisors around to stop students from speaking in Korean. But conversation in the theater was all done in English.
Any secret?
From the beginning of the project, it was based on the premise that every participant would only speak in English throughout all phases of the play's preparation.
The audience began entering at 3:50 p.m. and hundreds of seats in the school theater were filled with a mixed crowd including the very young, the very old and foreign residents within minutes.
The school invited hundreds of foreign students, immigrant wives and migrant workers residing in the vicinity to help quench their cultural thirst.
Finally, the cultural project that had taken considerable time and energy from the dozens of student performers and staff over the past six months came to fruition.
``Sometimes, people don't want to fall in love. Because when you love with someone it's too late to set conditions.'' ``Love trumps all. Love is the highest law.'' Performers' loud voice resonated in the theater.
The 90-minute play drew frantic applause and screaming from the audience. All cast, crew and staff came on stage for the encore.
``It was a great English drama,'' said Penny Crawford, a New Zealander teaching English in Seoul. ``The content was exciting and their English pronunciation was also clear and articulate.''
``Speaking only in English throughout all phases of the play's preparation was a sort of torture. But it was definitely helpful for us to gain confidence that I can speak in English well,'' an actor said during the following Q&A session.
``The production is the culmination of a six-month journey, in which we asked our students to deeply immerse themselves in new art, to explore a different dimension of the English language and literature,'' said Prof. Kyoung H. Park, chief director of the play. ``Through the project, participating students learned for the first time how to act, develop and produce a play while collaborating with me in English.''