Use of theater for a sustainable improvement of written & oral skills: a sample activity realized with Moliere's plays

Abstract

When training language teachers, it is necessary to plan a continuous development and improvement of written and oral skills, especially in the case of some teacher candidates who had not have the opportunity to study abroad, in countries where the foreign language that they are supposed to teach is spoken by native speakers. Therefore, for a sustainable improvement of the skills mentioned above, some practical activities have been planned and realized, in the scope of certain courses such as French Syntax and French Literature given in French teacher training Department of Istanbul University, during the academic year of 2013-2014. So, the main objective of this paper is to present an applied study, realized in French Literature course with students of the French Language Teacher Training Department of Hasan Ali Yucel Education Faculty in Istanbul University. The study consists of four steps which are reading, rewriting, adaptation and staging of plays of the famous French writer Moliere. Within the context of this study, two plays adapted by the students and the achievements obtained will be presented. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.