VAD: Vocabulary Acquisition via Drama, a new teaching tool!

VAD (Vocabulary Acquisition via Drama) is a new designed teaching tool that focuses both on oral and written vocabulary acquisition of a second language. VAD has a twofold scope. First, to assist teachers to motivate, captivate and engage their learners; second to provide learners with an effortless and enjoyable acquisition of vocabulary that they will be able to associate it explicitly and implicitly with other concepts and ideas so as to become confident users. VAD has been designed so as to enhance vocabulary development through the use of drama and tasks/ team-projects. In particular, its principles derive from Process Drama (PD) and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). Current researches support that PD cultivates the desire to communicate in the target language, boosts fluency, engagement and active participation, challenges the brain and strengthens the memory. VAD is a learner- centred method which has a solid structure and at the same time it can be flexible and adaptable. So far VAD has been implemented as a teaching medium for Welsh and Greek as second languages with great success. Taking into account the preliminary results, the second post evaluation that has been implemented in both languages’ learners proved that that the participants who had been taught via VAD presented better scores regarding the acquisition and the
retention of the target vocabulary compared to the participants from the respective control groups.