[ Abstract ]  The main aim of English teaching is to cultivate students’ communicative ability in the English language and the traditional teaching model could not meet this expectation. Current ELT ( English language teaching ) methods often neglect students’ need and fail to provide real world situation for students to practice what they have learned. Especially in oral English teaching and reading teaching, the traditional pedagogy is very boring and inefficient, violating the natural process of language learning. In classroom, teachers should cultivate students and organize the student-centered activity effectively, providing more simulated situations for students to practice English. Role-play is a very effective way of cultivating students’ interests. Theoretically, it is consistent with many theories; practically, it not only arouses students learning enthusiasm, but also gives students a chance to consolidate knowledge by using it. In role-playing, students interact in small group so that they have less pressure with enough room of creativity. However, in real practice, it still has some potential problems, and this essay tries to explore some countermeasures and principles for these problems.  

     [ Key words ] role-play; ELT; study interests; situation teaching

     角色扮演在英语教学中的作用

     [ 摘 要 ] 英语教学的主要目的是培养学生能够使用正确的语言进行交际,而传统的教学模式已经不能满足学生的这种需求。目前的英语教学常常忽视学生的需求，没有给学生提供真实情境，培养学生的交流交往能力。尤其是在口语教学和阅读教学中，传统的机械式的教学方法违背了人学习语言的自然规律，枯燥无味，效率低下。因此,课堂教学中,教师应充分调动学生的积极性,有效地组织起以学生为中心的课堂活动,为学生创造更多的真实情景,从而提高学生正确使用语言的能力。角色扮演则是一种极为有效的教学方法。理论上，它与多种教学理论相符合；实践上，它不仅激发学生的学习热情和学习兴趣，更重要的是给学生提供了各种运用第二语言的情境，在实际运用中巩固强化所学知识。学生的积极性被调动起来，在小组中各自担当角色，完成任务，并且有足够的空间发挥和创造。但角色扮演在实际操作和运用中，仍存在着潜在的问题和矛盾，本文就此提出了一些相应的对策和指导原则。

[关键词] 角色扮演；英语教学；学习兴趣；情景教学

     1.  Introduction

     The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to enable the students to use the foreign language in work or life when necessary. Thus we should teach that part of the language that will be used in the real world. However, this is not always the case in the present day foreign language teaching practice. “The primary goal of most foreign language learning is to develop the ability to use real and appropriate language to communicate and interact with others ; and the goal of foreign language teaching is to extend the range of communicative situation in which the learners can perform with focus on meaning without being hindered by the attention he must pay to linguistic form”[1]. But the present practice in the ELT classroom in China could not provide satisfactory conditions for both teachers and students to achieve the goals. How to let English learners feel the real language situation and context when learning English? Role-play is an effective way.

     2.  Some existing problems in ELT

      The current teaching methods neglect the real world situation and fail to cultivate students’ spontaneity. The wide use of role-play was not accidental. It came from some present educational problems. 

     2.1 In teaching spoken English: For years textbooks have been using dialogues in an attempt to teach spoken language to foreign language students. Complete sentences are often used in an attempt to teach students the grammar of the language; however, the natural speech of native speakers is often phrases or sentences fragments full of pauses, false starts, and repetition. The second major problem is the way most dialogues are taught. Teachers ask students to memorize dialogues by heart. Reading or memorizing a printed dialogue does not allow students to develop “the ability to produce the quick real-time responses which are an essential feature of fluency in a conversational context.”[2]“Practice makes perfect”，as the old saying goes, students should be given opportunities to put into practice the skills and knowledge being taught. What can teachers do to make teaching more effective and communicative? First of all, turn the dialogues into role plays, so the students can pretend they are acting as someone else. Some students become less inhibited about speaking in front of a class when they are acting.

     2.2　In teaching reading: at the post reading stage of reading teaching, teachers often rely upon reading aloud, asking comprehension questions or asking students to paraphrase sentences of text. Sometimes even sentence by sentence translation is conducted. We consider these activities inadequate to fulfill the task of developing learning. Teachers should provide the students with opportunities to relate what they have read to what they already know or what they feel and enable students to produce language based on what they have learned. So while teaching reading, role-play is also an effective activity.  

     3.  Definition

     “Role-play is an activity (esp. in language teaching or treating mentally ill people) in which a person acts a part.”[3] Here we discuss its meaning in pedagogy. It is a common language learning activity where students play different roles and interact from the point of view of the roles they play. Role-play is valuable in a language classroom for several reasons:

     1)   It is motivating;

     2)  Students interact in small groups so that they have less pressure;

     3)  Students have the chance to practice the newly learned language;

     4)   There is enough room for creativity.

  4.　Theoretical basis

     Role-play has been used as a tool for teaching in many areas and disciplines. The idea behind using role-play as a pedagogical tool relies on the idea that experience is the best teacher. Besides, role-play also is consistent with other theories.

     4.1 Behaviourist theory: Behavioural psychologist Skinner suggested language is  a form of behaviour. According to this theory, all complex forms of behaviour are seen as composed of simple muscular and glandular elements that can be observed and measured. Students thus follow “a certain procedure which has three major stages stimulus, response, and reinforcement”[4]. Role-playing is consistent with this theory.

     4.2 Cognitive theory: The term cognitive is often used loosely to describe method in which students are asked to think rather than simply repeat. According to Noam Chomsky, language is not a form of behaviour, it is an intricate rule based system and a large part of language acquisition is the learning of this system. There are a finite number of grammatical rules in the system and with a knowledge of these rules an infinite number of sentences can be produced. Students should be allowed to create their own sentences based on their understanding of certain rules. So role-play undoubtedly provides students this kind of chances to exercise creating utterance of their own.．

     4.3 Cooperative learning theory: “Cooperative learning is the use of small groups in which pupils work together to maximize their own learning when proper organized”. [5] Role-playing is an excellent means of involving students with limited English proficiency. It makes sense for all teachers who have limited English proficient pupils in their classes because all students are given frequent opportunities to speak, thus decreases the students’ dependence of teacher.

     4.4 English curriculum standards: “Linguistic skills, language knowledge, affect and attitudes of students, learning trategies and cultural awareness”[6] are the five goals of new curricula innovation processing in present China. The mission of the course is to promote students’ learning interests, make them build up self-confidence, and develop collaborative learning ability. To carry out the mission the curriculum highlights students’ practice and experiences in the process of language learning. Among a variety of teaching methods, role-play is one of the methods that meets all these requirements, making language learning through communication, and enables students to develop language knowledge as well as communicative skills.

     5Specific steps  

    Role-play is not easy to manoeuvre. In order to have it process effectively, careful steps should be assured to carry out.

     l    Explain the roles and setting up goals.

     Make sure students understand the task and the goals so that they have a clear idea about the incoming performance.

     l  Pairing/ grouping students and assigning roles. 

     Students interact in small groups, and they have less pressure but they should have clear responsibility. If certain roles did not allotted, too diffuse in responsibility will also spoil the performance.  

     l   Preparation.

     The whole class students practice the role-play according to the assignment in their own group. As for the task-achieving activity, students playing the same roles go into a group to work out the questions, doing the preparation for incoming demonstration.

     l  Role-play in pairs / groups in front of the class.

     Try to select different groups every time so that every students has the performance experience.

     l   Class viewing / demonstration

     Avoid too noise from the audience. The actors and actresses need a quiet environment.

     l  Teacher gives feedback based on active monitoring.

     Positive assessment is expected, for it can increase students’ confidence and reinforce their active behaviour. Too much error-correcting will stifle students desire of learning.

     6　Classification

     The key students master language is that the students learn the language through engaging in a variety of communicative activities. Role-play is social interaction activities classified as follows:

     l  “Role-playing through cued dialogues and information”[7]

     For example:    

Card A : You are talking to a new classmate.

              1. Greet your classmate.

              2.Ask your partner his or her previous school.

              3. Suggest to shopping together after school.

Card B: You are a new student at this school. One of your classmate greets you.

   1. Greet your classmate back.

   2. Answer the question.

    3. Respond to the suggestion.    

     A way to make the dialogue more similar to real life, yet still controlled enough so that the task is not too difficult for beginning and lower intermediate students, is to use cue cards, like above. This way an information gap is formed because each student only see one cue card and doesn’t know what the other person is going to say.

        Role-playing through goals or debate

     For example:

Card A: You and your friend are going out for lunch. You want to try something new because you are tired of the same food. You make a suggestion.

Card B: You and your friend are going out for lunch. You want to go to the place you always go, because you like the food. 

     The outcome of this role-play is not specified. It only sets up a point of disagreement. How the actors work out the disagreement and achieve their goals is up to them. Notice that the control of this role-play is much less and thus gives students more practice of thinking and talking in real-time.

     l “Large-scale simulation activities /drama”[8]

     For instance:

     While teaching the necklace (Senior English Book 1B), the teacher can first have the students relate the story and then act it out in several groups in the form of competition. Then assess their performances in following standards:

Language   Pronunciation and intonation   

     Fluency

     Rhythm and pace   

Acting   Facial expression    

     Body language   

     Cooperation  

Others   Costume   

     Make up    

     This role-play is very effective in activating the classroom climate and it is also of great significance in arousing the students’ interests of learning.

 Improvisation

     Traditionally, teachers allow students to practise a role play in pairs before asking a few pairs to perform in front of the entire class. So when they are performing, they are still not talking completely spontaneously. One way to force students to speak spontaneously is to ask the actors to come to the front of the class before the teacher tells them the situation. This is improvisation. The teacher then explains the situation so that the whole class can hear and gives the actors a few seconds to think about what they will say before they start.

     In addition, role-play is very flexible and resourceful in doing practice. Look at the dialogue below.

A: What are you going to do?

B: Oh, I am going to wash the dishes.    

     After students have practiced it in pairs, the teacher can ask them perform it in different moods such as happy, irritated, bored or in different role relationships such as a parent and a child, husband and wife, etc. Thus the students could feel the situation more profoundly with great interests.

     7  Functions

     Role-play models human interactions to provide a chance for students to exercise, creating effective and memorable experiences for learners. It places learners in a situation where they are asked to take on different roles and to accomplish their specific tasks, including problem solving. They offer an opportunity for learners to practice using the language in the right place, at the right time. The strength of role-play is that it presents an opportunity for authentic and spontaneous communication because learners are placed in realistic situations and they can “have the opportunity to use and practice the sort of language, particularly the vocabulary related to that situation, so that learners are rehearsed for real life”[9]. In addition, they can express what they want to say whenever the situation calls for it. In addition, role-playing is of great significance as it develops students’ both receptive and productive skills:

     7.1   It develops students’ listening: while role-playing, students practice listening when trying to get information from their partners.

     7.2   It develops students’ speaking: answering the questions according to what is heard, producing responses based on given cues, it is clear that this activity can practise speaking skills.

     7.3   Promoting knowledge acquisition: “Students in role-playing were found to use search and retrieval strategies more frequently than students in traditional learning situations. During the process of exchanging, there will be the information transferring from one peer to the other”[10]. Individual students are able to increase their mastery during this process: During the entire process, students are motivated to search language in their vocabulary storage and select the proper language to use. For example, teaching a reading about a writer’s biography is usually bored and the events that the writer experienced are uneasy for students to master. In this case, after the students read and understand the article, the teacher can let a student pretend the writer and stand in front of the class to relate “his ” or “her” whole life. Thus promote the students to acquire the knowledge of the writer with strong motivation. 

     7.4   Enhancing language proficiency: There is another significant benefit of doing role-playing. Language is the main tool for human communication. Role-play largely provides more opportunities for the students to practice their oral English. It is an ideal method of reviewing what we have learned by using it in real situation. It stimulates all the students’ integrated skills and thus consolidates all the language knowledge in their mind while trying to express themselves out. While others who do not involved in that activity can be easy to grasp more content knowledge even just sitting silently and listening to the performance in the classroom.

     7.5   Stimulate students’ interests and activate classroom climate to keep students engaged in class: With role play, students act out certain situations. Teachers generally try to make these situations fun and interesting. “Asking your boss for a day off”, or “Meeting people at a party”, etc. The teacher prepares the roles so that learners always have a lot to talk about. This motivates students in learning and creates a real communication situation and offers learners plenty of opportunities to practice.

     7.6   Improving social competence: the true mastery of a language involves communicative competence. While role-playing, individuals work together, they must interact with each other to promote each other’s success, thus increase students’ social skills, conflict-management and compromise. It also develops students’ communicative skills: while act out the dialogue, students’ get the chance to learn to get information from partners’ facial expressions, gestures and other body language thus develop students’ communicative skills.

     7.7   Promoting interpersonal relationships: Role-play has also keen accepted to improve interpersonal relationship among students. Role-play pairs or groups help students establish and maintain friendships with peers. Students who are isolated or alienated from their peers and who do not have friends are more likely to be at risk for violent or destructive behavior in society than those who experience social support and a sense of belonging. “To some extent, this interpersonal relationship also promote their academic achievements. In addition, skills of improving interpersonal relationship with other peers are the foundation for the success in their social career in future.”[11] Role-playing also has been linked to increases in self-esteem, attendance, time on task, enjoyment of school and classes, as well as a decrease in dependence on the teacher.

     8　Potential problems

     Role-play is virtually the way we can give students chances to practise improvising a range of real-life spoken language in the classroom, and it is extremely effective if the students are confident and cooperative, but it still exists some problems when processing it specifically.

     l  The uneasiness caused by talking in front of the class would inhibit the students to some degree. Instructors must do something to lower the inhibition first, for example, a preliminary demonstration or rehearsal before the class. Practice time can be prolonged.

     l  “From students’ perspective, because students are used to sitting in lecture where they are not required to talk, students may resist an activity that appears challenging and difficult and that forces them to use integrated skills, rather than being a passive learners”[12]. So teachers should stimulate their students’ enthusiasm by keeping encouragement, coaxing them to think and open their mouth.

     l   It will be uncontrolled and time-consuming if students fail to prepare enough. In preparation, if certain roles did not allotted, too diffuse in responsibility will also spoil the performance.  

     l In China, time is limited in every period class and all the classes are large sized. So it is impossible to provide a chance for all students to perform. Only a couple of students could display their performance. Others just sit in a classroom to hear and with no pressure, so they may mot pay attention to learning.

     l  Because of the characteristics, some introvert students may feel hard to perform in front of the whole class thus influence the simulated communication. But teachers could help them to overcome step by step. Ur points out that the factors that affect the success of role-play are: “the teacher’s enthusiasm; careful instructions; clear situations and roles; and making sure that the language they will need to carry out the role-play”[13].

     9　Guiding principles for role-playing

     9.1Communication purpose[14]: The activity must involve the students in performing a real communicative purpose rather than just practicing language for its own sake. In order for this to occur there must be some kinds of “information gap” that students seek to bridge when they are role-playing.

     9.2 Communicative desire: The activity must create a desire to communicate in the students .That is even if communication is forced on the students, they must feel a real need to communicate.

     9.3   Prepare before performing: Rushing into a role play-activity often leads to confusion and dissatisfaction. Have students practice the task in pairs before selecting a couple of pairs to perform in front of the whole class. If acting out a short play, before students display their performance, they should be given the script or the story they are going to work on. They can choose their favorite roles or they will be allotted certain roles.

     9.4   Acceptable level language requirement: “The language required in performance should be lower than that used in intensive language learning activity in the same class. It should be easily recalled and produced by the participants, so that they can speak fluently”. [15] It is a good idea to teach or review essential vocabulary before the activities start. If the task is too frustrating, the students are likely to give up or revert back to the native language.

     9.5   Be sensitive when correcting the students: The basic principles of error correction is to remind students of their big errors that prevent from communicating and ignore the trivial one. As to when and how to give feedback, there is no definite answer, it largely depends on the teachers’ long time spent in teaching and a consideration in affective and cognitive factors. Nevertheless, “the instructors should put it in mind that they should do their best to avoid stifling students’ attempt at speaking in the target language by providing correct feedback.”[16]  

     9.6   Clear in responsibility: Allot the roles and set up goals so as to make students clear in responsibility. Students interact in small groups, and they have less pressure but they should have clear responsibility.

     9.7   Praise the actors: The students need lots of support & assistance to practice English. Praise them frequently and they will be competitive and active.

     9.8   Choose some proper texts: not all texts to involve role-play activity while teaching. Not all texts suit for role-play activity

     9.9   Choose proper students: The first few times when the teacher organizes role-play, it is a good idea to choose some more outgoing students who will not feel inhibited while performing in public, which is also setting up demonstrations at the same time.

     10　　Conclusion

     In the student-centered learning process , students are given more opportunities to practice the target language and develop their communicative ability. Role-play is one of the most effective forms of English training because it puts people into the situation where they have to rely entirely on English to do their task/reach the goal that the teacher sets for them. It’s also a chance to be really creative and develop interesting conversations.

     In general, role-play is an effective tool for students, especially in teaching some introvert students. It enables students to learn by using the target language in meaningful interactive situations. Role-play is not easy to manoeuvre, but it helps to lead to social and academic success for all students.

     References

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     ［８］   同上

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     ［１４］        同[7] P19

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