The Effect of Body Language-Centered Drama Activities on Students' Speaking Skills in Secondary School Turkish Teaching
Authors: Şahin Tuğrul Gökmen 
Published: September 2023

The body is undoubtedly the first language of communication in human history. Body language, which dates back to the first human, was the first language with which humans communicated with each other. Human being is a social being; just as it needs nutrition, shelter, security, knowledge, respect and love, it also needs communication. Therefore, speaking skill has become one of the language skills that individuals use most in daily life throughout their lives. Drama method is a method that can be used to help people get to know themselves and their environment, improve their relationships, gain different perspectives, and increase social harmony. The aim of this research is to determine the effect of body language-centered drama activities on the development of students' speaking skills in secondary school Turkish teaching. The participants of the study consist of 55 7th grade students studying in a secondary school in Battalgazi district of Malatya province. In this research, mixed research method sequential explanatory design was used. A semi-experimental design was used in the quantitative part of the research, and the quantitative data of the research was collected using the Speaking Skills Attitude Scale (2017), and the phenomenology design was used in the qualitative part, and the data were collected with student diaries, semi-structured interview form and observation form. In the quantitative part of the research, a control and an experimental group were created. Experimental and control groups were determined according to the students' pre-test results from the attitude scale. According to the results of the Mann Whitney U test, the groups were found to be equivalent. In the experimental group, body language-centered drama prepared in the context of Turkish language teaching program achievements was taught, and in the control group, lessons were taught taking into account the current Turkish course curriculum. At the end of the research, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 9 experimental group students, a diary was collected after each drama application, and observations were made by taking pre- and post-videos of the students' body language-centered speaking skills. A reliability and validity study was conducted on the applied quantitative and qualitative data collection tools. Analysis of the post-tests in the experimental and control groups was made with the Mann Whitney U test. Qualitative data were analyzed with codes and categories created by content analysis and descriptive analysis.

When the results of the research were examined, it was concluded that the Turkish lesson taught with body language-centered drama activities was more effective than the normal Turkish lesson in terms of giving speaking skill gains. Similarly, it was observed that the interest and love of the students participating in the study regarding speaking skills increased after the body language-centered drama activities, and their anxiety decreased. In addition, it was observed that students began to use body language easily both in the classroom and in daily life. Looking at the results of the qualitative data of the research, it was seen that the students started to use body language in and outside the classroom, their speaking skills improved and even their existing speech disorders improved.

The study results were examined in the literature and compared from both similar and different perspectives. Looking at the results, researchers can make variations in their studies in order to obtain rich data; for drama practices, they should conduct pilot exercises before implementing the created drama workshops and pay attention to the physical characteristics of the place where the drama will be implemented; recommendations were made for institutions to give teacher candidates the opportunity to practice in drama classes in faculties of education and to provide drama training to teachers in in-service courses opened within the Ministry of National Education.