Lorena Bickert
Thinking in Conversation: Musical Theater in English Teaching and Learning
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann, Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann, Prof. Dr. Theresa Summer
Existing research on music and theater in EFL and native-speaker classrooms highlights the beneficiary effects of teaching both. Yet, a genre that combines these benefits—the musical—remains almost entirely unexplored in the TEFL world. This postdoctoral project argues that thinking in conversation with the text emerges as a productive teaching and learning strategy that both validates students as diverse individual learners and allows them to holistically work with a text beyond the communicative boundaries created by the idea of English as a foreign language. I propose the musical as a genre-crossing and multimedia text type to move towards a culturally sensitive and conversational approach to TEFL. Not only does musical theater provide ample opportunity for training both the receptive and productive skills through audio-visual, reading, and (re-)writing activities. Musicals also foster literary and musical appreciation as well as intercultural learning in a highly motivating manner. As learners engage in manifold conversations with these texts, relating to US-American narratives but also to transcultural experiences of marginalization and connection in a contemporary globalized world, classrooms become cultural and linguistic safe spaces for the various ways of speaking in and about English as a world language.
