Creating an Interdisciplinary Space: Role-Plays in Teaching English for Engineering
Creating an Interdisciplinary Space: Role-Plays in Teaching English for Engineering

Summary/Abstract: When the learning process takes place in natural circumstances we usually learn what we really need, we practice what we will have to do in real life. Comparing the activities, games and improvisations used in actor training or drama in education and the role-plays, simulations and drama techniques used in language teaching we can discover several similarities regarding the main principles, goals and technique s. Communicative competence and performance can be considered the common ground of acting and language teaching, this is their overlapping goal. Teaching a foreign language to young professionals (in our case, engineering students) involves the aim to enable a person to “play” better his own “role” before a social audience. The objectives of this paper are to demonstrate some of the overlapping goals in actor training and language teaching and show how the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) classroom can function as aninterdisciplinary space, the meeting point of language pedagogy, actor training / drama in education and engineering sciences, thus creating a complex learning experience.

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