Theater as a safe environment to start productive skills development in an EFL classroom

This article describes a pedagogical proposal based on theater as a safe space to develop productive skills in an EFL classroom. Thirty-six eleventh graders from a public school in Tunja participated in the theater sessions. In each session, we collected data through recordings, interviews, and field notes to understand the impact of the pedagogical intervention. The findings suggested that theater could help créate a safe environment that decreased students’ anxiety levels while exploring the language. As a result, the students’ productive skills started to emerge. We argue the need to change classroom dynamics, organization, and time management in order to create transformative places that foster safe environments in the EFL classroom.

Theater as a safe environment to start productive skills development in an EFL classroom El teatro como un lugar seguro para desarrollar habilidades comunicativas productivas en las clases de inglés como lengua extranjera eleventh graders from a public school in Tunja participated in the theater sessions. In each session, we collected data through recordings, interviews, and field notes to understand the impact of the pedagogical intervention. The findings suggested that theater could help create a safe environment that decreased students' anxiety levels while exploring the language. As a result, the students' productive skills started to emerge. We argue the need to change classroom dynamics, organization, and time management in order to create transformative places that foster safe environments in the EFL classroom.   stated that writing and speaking were productive language skills. The same authors further asserted that "More energy is needed to produce any outcome of those types" (p. 478). In fact, most EFL students face issues when learning to speak or to write. Brown and Yule (1983) mentioned that learning productive skills is one of the most difficult aspects of foreign language teaching and learning. In this sense, productive skills can be considered as one of the most challenging tasks to teach.
When students have to speak or write in another language, they can feel shy, anxious, or uninterested in the topics. Creating an environment that reduces these factors is a necessity for teachers. In fact, Dornyei (2001) suggested that building safe and supportive environments helps students feel comfortable with taking risks because they know that they will not feel embarrassed or criticized if they make a mistake. Therefore, safe environments can contribute to enhancing students' productive skills.
Theater is often used to monitor and strengthen teaching and learning processes in many knowledge areas. For this pedagogical proposal, we considered the use of theater to help eleventh graders feel safer and more confident in the EFL classroom and, as Maslow (1943)

Speaking.
Speaking is "the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts" (Chaney & Burk, 1998). Brown (1994) also stated that speaking is a dynamic and interesting process that includes producing, receiving and communicating information. Terefore, speaking is a process in which the speaker orally and coherently communicates his/her thoughts.
Other aspects of speaking have been defined, such as being a face to face action, happening in real time, and being interactive (Cornbleet & Carter, 2001).

Writing.
The act of writing is far beyond putting well organized words and structures on paper. Rather, it is the act of giving meaning and substance to our written thoughts. Mitchell (1996) (Mitchell, 1996).

LANGUAGE LEARNING.
For every culture and language, the term "theater" has had different definitions and connotations.
Nevertheless, bodily expression, vocal power, written creation, literary reflection, and auditory awareness have all contributed to defining theater and its artistic abilities. Through drama, the communicative process can be encouraged.
Theater is also a representation of human actions based on reality. It can emphasize social, religious, political, and cultural aspects and situations. The language, with all of its expressions, serves as a vehicle for giving and receiving meaningful and co-constructed messages through individual and collective work.
Nowadays, theater has become a frequently practiced educational strategy to monitor and strengthen the learning process regardless of  (Murphy, 2011).

SAFE ENVIRONMENTS.
A safe environment is a space that favors students' identities, voices, and hopes. Safe environments also honor aspects related to students' home culture and background knowledge. If students feel represented and able to share, they may also feel more engaged to learn a foreign language. Additionally, teachers can connect students' prior knowledge and content to encourage communicative skills development. For example, a safe speaking environment is one that builds knowledge from students' experiences and home cultures and, little by little, moves toward more complex and unfamiliar concepts.

PROPOSAL.
The main objective of the pedagogical proposal was to use theater to create a safe environment and, thereby, enhance eleventh graders' productive skills at a public institution in Tunja, Boyacá.

CONDITIONS OF THE IMPLEMENTATION.
We used theater as a pedagogical strategy to create a safe environment to enhance the students' productive skills. In terms of theater and performance, we recognize that other forms of communication are present, such as words, voices, gestures, and body movement.
Dramatization, whether it is through written or spoken production, offers numerous possibilities to explore discursive and sociolinguistic competences.

FOLLOWED WERE AS FOLLOWS:
Students' needs regarding English language skills. In order to understand the students' needs regarding their language skills, we applied a diagnostic questionnaire. We found that the English class was primarily focused on completing the course book, translating texts, and practicing grammar. Reading, writing, and listening skills had to be practiced at home.
Meanwhile, speaking was neither practiced at home or school. The students' main weaknesses, Class organization. Before implementing the proposal, the students were asked to make teams. Each team had eight members for a total of four teams and four drama plays. To ensure that each member participated, a leader was assigned to each group. The leader had to make sure everyone on the team participated and followed the rules and guidelines. In this way, the students actively communicated with each other, shared responsibilities, and were respectful with all of the members of the group.

Skills selected for the English sessions.
The topics selected for the lessons applied were related to theater. We also considered the students' English level, as well as their receptive and productive skills. Additionally, we took into account , who stated that "both types of skills are inseparable and one cannot exist without the other". In most cases, receptive skills support productive skills, which is why we organized the English language lessons as seen below: (i) Let's focus: listening as the initial step to process drama stories in the foreign language.
(ii) Let's comprehend: reading comprehension in order to understand the drama plot. To conclude this section, it is worth noting that each session attempted to integrate several skills.
For instance, students had to write down ideas and keywords when listening to the stories. Also, they had to write a draft to narrate the synopsis of the stories, as well as jotting down their own interventions on cards to perform later on. The students also participated in an intonation and pronunciation game, which was evaluated in the third reading moment. Meanwhile, the individual or collective performances went hand in hand with their creative writing.

FINDINGS
For the data analysis, we used aspects of the grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, 1978) to account for the impact of theater as a safe environment to promote productive skills Theater as a way to decrease students' anxiety.

T H E A T E R A S A S A F E E N V I R O N M E N T T O S T A R T P R O D U C T I V E S
The first category describes how students' anxiety decreased during the pedagogical intervention. Anxiety in the foreign language classroom has been extensively researched (Mak, 2011;Grant, Huang, & Pasfield-Neofitou, 2013;Baran-Lucarz, 2014;Atas, 2015). Liu and Huang (2011) explained that "foreign language anxiety was responsible for students' negative emotional reactions to language learning since they had to deal with a totally foreign language" (p. 1). Liu (2006) identified that anxiety in EFL classrooms is associated with making errors in pronunciation and communicating in front of peers.
During the pedagogical intervention, we noticed how the students started to feel more comfortable. From the very beginning, we chose to introduce the plays before asking students to perform, which sparked their curiosity. It seems that curiosity and anxiety are inversely related to each other. If a student feels curious about what they will learn, their motivation will also increase while their anxiety decreases.
As mentioned previously, we carried out six sessions in order to meet the objective of this study. The following is an excerpt from our field notes, in which we described the students' attitudes toward the first workshop, At the beginning of the activity, the students showed curiosity and intrigue for the plays. We observed an initial interest and motivation from the students as they · 4 1 7 · them. In this sense, Lamata (2005) mentioned that curiosity and creativity are two linked concepts. Creativity related to the ability to question, review, and create through exploration. Lamata (2005) concluded that curiosity is usually the first step to being creative. The next excerpt, taken from one of the sessions, supports the previous explanation. Also, we can notice that students were committed to create and explore new possibilities for the story. In doing so, they were eager to know how to communicate their ideas in English.

[Audio transcription, Session 3]
In an interview related to the session, student 5 mentioned that the plays were useful as they were the starting point to continue creating the story. He also mentioned that the play helped him be very creative.
Student 5: I like the idea of having plays to follow because I just finish them. I think this activity was nice because we could invent different ends and it was very funny. The only thing that we had to do was to continue with the topic presented.

EXPLORE LANGUAGE.
Theater, as a pedagogical strategy, can help students explore the language they are trying to learn. Drama can improve students' cognitive growth, while developing their thinking, oral expression, listening comprehension, reading, and writing reflection skills. Additionally, creative writing and oral and corporal expression through drama can encourage and engage students in exploring new ways of learning and producing the target language in a contextualized and positive environment (Degirmenci & Yavuz, 2015).
Producing a play requires written, spoken, and corporal expression organization and planning.
In the sessions, the students had to use all of their creativity to produce their own stories. Thanks to theater, the students were able to explore their capabilities as learners while practicing a new language. Moreover, listening and reading comprehension was paired and practiced with written and oral expression.
In order to reach the goal of language exploration, the students went through a process of receptivity as an initial step. First, they listened and read the plays, thereby, concentrating, understanding, and reflecting. Due to this process, productive skills began to emerge in a more practical sense. We attempted this process every time we organized the sessions. For example, the students began the session by listening and reading the play, followed by writing their drafts. All three of these skills were intertwined and needed to produce the final oral production of the play.
Below, we mentioned the students' attitudes toward the sessions, especially as they related to exploring the language. First, we present our field notes in terms of writing. In the second We followed the models provided and changed some words and expressions.

(Interview, Transcript 2)
In the final students' performance, most of the students did their best to express themselves in a meaningful way, despite being nervous. In the excerpt below, we highlighted the key aspects in the oral production of their plays.

CONCLUSIONS
For this study, we attempted to see how a pedagogical proposal, based on theater as a safe space, guided eleventh graders to start developing productive skills in an EFL classroom.
We found that theater could be used as a safe space to initiate productive skills. In fact, theater helped the students decrease their anxiety, so that they could explore the language. On the one hand, using theater in this EFL classroom became a good alternative to creating a safe environment because the eleventh graders decreased their anxiety levels. This happened because theater gave them the possibility to be curious without feeling judged.

T H E A T E R A S A S
Curiosity is related to creativity and aids in language exploration, such as when the students guessed and predicted language in use. When the students used their creativity and corporal expression to produce oral and written texts, they were exploring the language. The students discovered and reflected on their hidden qualities, such as acting in front of others, personifying a character, reflecting on their emotions through bodily expression, and making up scenarios.
Likewise, the students became more sociable and expressive during the sessions. Dramatic expression is a complete language that aims at explaining reality in a conscious and expressive way through the body and word. In this way, appropriating a foreign language through theater helps students enter into the language, get to know it, explore it, and transform it.
This pedagogical experience intended to be a part of a student-centered pedagogy.
As such, students were active participants in the learning process rather than receivers of knowledge (Bayram & Hayirsever, 2016). In this case, the teachers created a positive learning atmosphere, where they could make decisions, manage groups, and help with incomplete tasks in the classroom.
We also think it takes time, patience, and careful organization to transform EFL classrooms into safe environments. Creating such spaces in the classroom requires a conscious effort from language teachers to unlearn preconceived ways of teaching and re-learn. In other words, this implies changing the roles we, as English teachers, have usually assumed. Therefore, the role of the teacher becomes more flexible and constructive. Theater also allows the teacher to have a more sensitive and holistic vision of human development within the teaching-learning process due to an empowering dialogical interaction between teachers and learners (Cervantes, 2019;McLaren, 2003;Freire & Shor, 1987).
In addition to changing the role of teachers and students, the classroom needs to be a judgement free zone in order to help students develop their productive skills in another language (Kubanyiova, 2006). Thus, teachers need to be committed to creating spaces for conversation and supportive feedback. In opposition to Ur's (2006) statement that feedback cannot be given without judgement, we believe that teachers can make an effort to support their students' productive skills to encourage their selfconfidence.