Role-play in English Language Teaching
Feng Liu & Yun Ding
School of Foreign Languages, Qingdao University of Science
and Technology
Qingdao 266061, China
Tel: 86-532-8895-8959 E-mail: liufeng7079@163.com
Abstract
Role-play is an effective technique to animate the teaching
and learning atmosphere, arouse the interests of learners, and make the
language acquisition impressive. So this research will mainly focus on how to
apply it successfully and take the most advantage of it in English class. The
outcome shows there are four crucial factors for its success: the topic chosen
should be real and relevant; the teacher need 'feed-in' the appropriate
language; correct errors in a proper way; some of teachers role are facilitator,
spectator or participant. Incorporating role-play into the classroom adds
variety, a change of pace and opportunities for a lot of language production
and also a lot of fun!
Keywords: Role-play,
Procedure, Feed-in
The main elements of Communicative Approach usually appear
as three steps in classroom teaching: 1) presentation 2) practices 3)
production. Applied to the third period, one of the effective practice is
role-play, which emphasizes much on the comprehensively performance of the
target language. While many researchers proved this means to be useful, many
second language teachers still address to researchers: how to take most
advantage of role-play and how to make a balance between it and the normal
presentation of class room teaching? The research followed is an attempt to
answer such questions by analyzing several related researches and some
empirical evidence.
1. Related research
From the discussion of communicative teaching methodology,
we can find that the function of language is not elicitedfrom the forms of
language, but its obligatory contexts .the contexts may be various; however,
the forms of contexts stillhave some regular patterns to follow. D.Wilkins
(1976) thus raised the notional syllabuses, which arranged teaching program mostly
on the basis of contexts instead of being limited by the forms of sentences .to
apply to the teaching contents to the desire of language application,
communication becomes a widely used technique. According to it,
Wilkins put forward the issue of role-play, which is
actually an imitation the reality .the students are required to speak properly
in line with the contexts and their "roles". The whole procedure is
as follows: When organizing the practice of role-play, the teacher must provide
a context and several roles for students to prepare and then perform in the
class. The performance can be developed by several groups. When one is
performing, the other students are audience and discuss its advantages and
disadvantages afterward .the discussion itself is also a kind of practice.
Empirical evidence derived from Wilkins' research and theories proved that
role-play is an animate the teaching and learning atmosphere, arouse the
interests of learners, and make the language acquisition impressive. Wilkins
had proposed the general figures and theories for role-play, while some further
researches were applied for this subject by the other researchers; more
problems were thus raised to be solved afterwards.
Fraser, Rintell, and Walters (1980) proffer role-play as a useful
means to study learners' pragmatic competence. Therefore, many contextual
features are important in determining how a speaker will behave .in a
role-play; the speech act can be kept constant while the contextual features
are varied. Many dimensions of a learner's pragmatic competence may be explored
in this way .in Fraser, Rintell and Walter's procedure; they also used
role-plays with puppets when the subjects have been children.
From the two theoretical and empirical studies, we can get
general concepts of role-play. Some further and more concise issues may be
raised by the research as follows:
The purpose of role-play that applies to practical usage in
communication demands the flexibility of participants' words, generally
speaking, the more approximately the activity access to reality, the more
interests students will take in .so the choice of roles and contexts become
very important. When teachers design a role-play, they must take students' ages
and experience into consideration.
To sum up, the studies recited above presented the general
research for role-play and affirmed the positive effect of role-play, which is
proved to be useful in communicative teaching method .The lack of findings on
this subject may be due to the fact that they did not give particular
illustration for the regulation of the relationship between the teaching roles
and learning roles. In this activity, students obviously played a center role.
However, teachers should be a surveyor and control the whole situation in order
to make class going on smoothly. And how can teacher control the procedure
Successfully? And how should teachers do when some negative
things appear? My proposed study will try to provide some empirical evidence
for solving such problems.
2. Methodology
2.1 Research questions
The proposed study addresses the following research
questions.
1). In the procedure of role-play, how will the teachers do
if the situation is "out of control"?
2). Shall the errors made by students be corrected in time?
3). If students discuss in native language without being
aware of it, shall teachers correct him or not?
2.2 Method
The subjects of this study would be 30 Chinese freshmen
learning English as a foreign language. They belong to one whole class. The
experiment would take two 50-minutes classes. During the procedure, the
students would be divided into ten groups, each one including three students.
Each group would be given a topic. In order to make a
comparison, every two groups will share the same one. For the first class, teacher
will take 10 minutes to explain the rules for this activity and make the
previous work such as dividing the students into different groups and
distribute topics to each group. Students thus will get information about the
activity but not be told the experimental purpose of this experiment. And then
they would have 15-20 minutes to prepare.
For the rest of the time, except for the break, each group
has 5 minutes to present themselves in front of the class. When one is
performing, the others would watch and record their comments for the player's
advantages and disadvantages. After that the last twenty minutes would be taken
for discussion. From the discussion, both the teacher and the students would
get an impressive comparison for each counterpart groups.
2.3 Proposed procedure
The practice of students' performance actually took 60
minutes .so there were thirty minutes left for the discussion. Generally
speaking, this experiment gets its anticipated outcomes.
Topics given to the students were as below: Situation one:
Several freshmen are talking about college life and their majors. All of them
are unsatisfied with their major to some extent.
Situation Two: John, one of your classmates, has been sick
in hospital for quite some time. Now he is going to be back to school. You and
your partners are talking about giving him some help with his missed study.
Situation three: you and your partner are from different parts of China. You
are talking about the difference between your hometown and your university. Situation
four: shopping A finds a pair of jeans whose design and color are exactly to
his/her taste. A likes it very much but thinks it’s too
expensive. So A bargains with B, the salesperson, hoping to
get some discount on the price.
The four topics are familiar to young students' life
experience and have little limitation for speakers' words. Students could bring
into full play of themselves with their own knowledge and experience .So the
whole class went successfully.
3 Results
3.1 Vocabulary
From the performance, students consciously applied the
vocabulary from the presentation of new lessons .The effect of memorization and
application of new words is proved better than single practice of recitation.
Almost 21 students (70%) applied the new vocabulary freely during the
procedure. As for the four topics, they are real and relevant to the students’ life and all provide enough
flexibility for students to imagine. Occasionally, they would rely on Chinese
to express some difficult meaning.
3.2 Grammar
The students avoided the limit of "formal speech
"by taking lifelike forms in their conversation, e.g. elliptical
sentences, repetition, exclamatory sentences, etc. Some errors occasionally
occurred. Those serious grammatical errors were corrected by the teacher
immediately or by the students in the afterward discussion. Some slips of
tongue were neglected while the speaker himself was aware of it.
3.3 Communicative purpose
Without rigid limit of word application, students had much
space to bring their imagination and intelligence into full play. About 80%(24
students) can communicate freely and fluently in English in this way. However,
the accuracy of their speaking needs to be improved. Here the accuracy does not
only mean using grammars and vocabulary correctly without errors, but also
refers to the "property of language ", which means to speak
appropriately according to different time, places and situations.
3.4 Teaching procedure
During the whole procedure, there is no situation out of
control occurred .all students throw themselves into their "roles",
fusing the ideas, emotions and languages all together.
After the performance, the discussion went on with high
enthusiasm. They made poignant comments on each other’s performance and declared that they
benefit a lot from others’ presentation. Students also put forward some creative
suggestions for this kind of practice. Those would be discussed in the
following part.
4. Suggestions
4.1 Prepare for success
At the first period, the teacher should be brief and to the
point so that the students would have more time to perform. Also, try to keep
the topic real and relevant and the roles you ask students to play as real to
life as possible. Try to think through the language the students will need and
make sure this language has been presented. Students may need the extra support
of having the language on the board. When the role-play began the students felt
'armed' with the appropriate language. At higher levels the students will not
need so much support with the language but they will need time to 'get into'
the role. Furthermore, the teacher should create a comfortable atmosphere so
that the students wouldn’t feel nervous and pressed
4.2 Feed-in language
As students practice the role-play they might find that they
are stuck for words and phrases. In the practice stage the teacher has a chance
to 'feed-in' the appropriate language. This may need the teacher to act as a
sort of 'walking dictionary', monitoring the class and offering assistance as
and when necessary. If you are not happy doing this and you feel that the
process of finding the new language should offer more student autonomy, you
could have 'time-out' after the practice stage for students to use dictionaries
to look up what they need. Feeding-in the language students need is
fundamental. By doing so, they will learn new vocabulary and
structure in a natural and memorable environment. It is a chance to use real
and natural language.
4.3 Error Correction
There are many ways to correct mistakes when using role-play.
It is rarely appropriate for the teacher to jump in and correct every mistake.
This could be incredibly de-motivating! Some students do like to be corrected
straight after a role-play activity, while the language is still fresh in their
minds. Sentences with errors can be written on the board for the group to
correct together.
Self-correction - If you have the equipment to record the
role-plays either on audiocassette or on video, students can be given the
opportunity to listen to the dialogue again and reflect on the language used.
They may find it easy to spot their own mistakes. Peer-correction - Fellow
students may be able to correct some mistakes made by their peers. Students
could be asked to
listen out for both great bits of language they'd like to
use themselves, and some mistakes they hear. Be careful to keep peer-correction
a positive and profitable experience for all involved.
Making a note of common mistakes yourself and dealing with
them in future classes ensures that the students don't lose motivation by being
corrected on the spot or straight after the role-play. Negotiate with students
and ask them how they would like to be corrected
4.4 The role of the teacher
Some of the possible teacher roles are: Facilitator -
students may need new language to be 'fed' in by the teacher. If rehearsal time
is appropriate the feeding in of new language should take place at this stage.
Spectator - The teacher watches the role-play and offers comments and advice at
the end. Participant - It is sometimes appropriate to get involved and take
part in the role-play yourself.
To sum up, incorporating role-play into the classroom adds
variety, a change of pace and opportunities for a lot of language production
and also a lot of fun! It can be an integral part of the class and not a
'one-off' event. It's fun and motivating; quieter students get the chance to
express themselves in a more forthright way; the world of the classroom is
broadened to include the outside world - thus offering a much wider range of
language opportunities. In addition to
these reasons, students who will at some point travel to an
English speaking country are given a chance to rehearse their English in a safe
environment. Real situations can be created and students can benefit from the
practice. Mistakes can be made with no drastic consequences.
References
D. A. Wilkins. (1976). Notional
Syllabuses. London, OUP.
Fraser, B., E. Rintell, & J. Walters. (1980). An Approach to Conducting Research on the Acquisition
of Pragmatic
Competence in a Second Language. In D. Larsen-Freeman (Ed.), Discourse Analysis in Second
Language Research (pp.
75-91). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
H. G. Widdowson. (1984). Explorations
in Applied Linguistics. London: OUP.
Harmer, J. (1991). The
Practice of English Language Teaching.
Longman.
Johnson,
K & K. (1981). Morrow. Communication
in the Classroom.
Longman.
Role-play in English Language Teaching
Today I would like to
practice my reading skill. Now I choose the journal about Role-play in English
Language Teaching for my reading. In this journal has many topics that I can
summarize such as the procedure of role-play, The role of the teacher and etc.
First, Role-play is an
effective technique to animate the teaching and learning atmosphere, arouse the
interests of learners, and make the language acquisition impressive. From the
performance, students consciously applied the vocabulary from the presentation
of new lessons. The students avoided the limit of "formal speech "by
taking lifelike forms in their conversation, e.g. elliptical sentences,
repetition, exclamatory sentences.
Next, In the whole
procedure, there is no situation out of control occurred .all students throw
themselves into their "roles", fusing the ideas, emotions and
languages all together. After the performance, the discussion went on with high
enthusiasm. They made poignant comments on each other’s performance and
declared that they benefit a lot from others’ presentation. Students also put
forward some creative suggestions for this kind of practice. Those would be
discussed in the following part.
Finally, The role of
the teacher. The teacher should prepare situation for success. The practice
stage the teacher has a chance to 'feed-in' the appropriate language. Teacher
should correct mistakes when using role-play. Some of the possible teacher
roles are: Facilitator - students may need new language to be 'fed' in by the
teacher.
To conclusion, From the
discussion of communicative teaching methodology, we can find that the function
of language is not elicited from the forms of language, but its obligatory
contexts .the contexts may be various; however, the forms of contexts still
have some regular patterns to follow.
