The Hong Kong's experience of borrowing drama pedagogy from the west

This paper aims at describing and explaining how drama pedagogy is appropriated in the Chinese language classrooms in Hong Kong. Drawing on the theories of dialogue and appropriation of Mikhail Bakhtin, the research results find that the dialogicality of drama in Hong Kong' s classrooms are conditional, and therefore deviant from the conventional as conceptualised and described in the major literature. A spectrum of the appropriation of drama in the language classrooms in Hong Kong is developed and discussed. At one end of the spectrum, there is still domination of the teacher's monologic input of official knowledge and skills; at the other end, destablisation of the centrality of the text and the authoritarian role of the teacher is identified suggesting alteration in the classroom interaction routine, and even the opening of the drama world. This spectrum illustrates how the teachers waver between persisting monologue and embracing dialogue the result of which is the development of a hybrid approach to appropriate drama pedagogy. The study acknowledges the positive role of drama pedagogy in transforming the Chinese language classroom, which is always stereotyped as a monologic, teacher-centred, serious and studious space.