Transforming STEM students’ communicative confidence in performance-based EAL classes

This article presents performance-based English as an Additional Language (EAL) courses at a French university, where STEM undergraduates can replace traditional English classes with a programme incorporating drama, theatrical improvisation, and debating. Online informal learning has developed students’ language skills but often leaves them with oral production anxiety. Drawing on an enactive-performative framework, we argue that language learning is an embodied, experiential, and affective process. Students perceive the programme as a supportive and transformative learning environment that increases learner investment and enhances communicative competence and confidence. Using an online survey, we analyse data from 60 students. The findings suggest that the programme’s benefits are differentiated by students’ self-assessed proficiency. Learners with intermediate proficiency report greater gains in fluency, while advanced learners report improving most in eloquence skills such as stress management and coverbal communication. The data describe a perceived personal and psychosocial transformation, with enhanced self-awareness and well-being. The students perceive an improvement in their control over stress and body language and seem to shift their focus from accuracy to intelligibility and interaction. We conclude that embodied pedagogy provides a rehearsal space equipping future scientists not only with linguistic skills but with the holistic communicative competence required for a globalised world.