ROLE-PLAYS 1. INTRODUCTION A role-play is a way of bringing situation from real life into the classroom. When we do role-play, we ask students to image:
A role: to pretend to be a different person. A situation: to pretend to be doing something different.
In role-play the situation is fixed but they must make up the exact words to say, so reading aloud a dialogue is not the same as role-play.
2. ROLE-PLAY IN LANGUAGE LEARNING Role-plays requires careful planning, careful preparation and careful organisation. There is a range of behaviour in a role-play which is part of the education and cultural knowledge. The normal day-to-day functioning of our interaction which other depends on reasonably strict adherence to its unwritten laws. The linguistic aspects is perhaps the most important part of our role behaviour. We use more or less formal speech depending on our relationship to the person we are speaking to, in this way, you can regret a friend: ”Hi there, John!”, but you must greet your boss saying: “Good morning, Mr. Smith!”. Some of the roles we have to fulfil require the use of specific features of language, i.e. a special register. Language can also be affected by the use we wish to put it to. A person can wish to express an opinion, to agree or disagree, to persuade or complain, etc. Function, then, is an important aspect to be considered when selecting which language to use. It is also important the attitude that the speaker takes towards the situation and towards the other people involved in it: polite, neutral or rude. On the other hand, the speaker must be able to recognise these feelings in his interlocutors to adjust the reactions accordingly, and it is very important to say these feelings with the correct stress, intonation, rhythm, tone of voice, speed in the way of expression, pitch and loudness to the listener realises the real intonation. Role-play is a classroom activity which gives the student the opportunity to practise the language, the aspects of role behaviour, and the actual roles he / she may need outside the classroom. We must therefore help our students to an extensive knowledge and understanding of role-behaviour, and give them extensive practice in using this knowledge. This kind of activity cannot be achieved in a totally teacher-dominated classroom. Traditional roles of teacher and students must be forgotten, at least for the period of time during which the role-play takes place. The student must be free to play his role as he sees it, to speak when he judges necessary or appropriate, in short, to be his own master. It follows that there is no place in a role-play for teacher direction, interference or even guidance. The teacher selects the material and directs the language
practice for the pre-role-play activities, but once the role-play has started, teacher direction must stop. It is very important t know how you must work a role-play to practice all the features needed to get a fluent use of the foreign language. Finally, there are many activities which are often confused with role-play, but are, in fact very different. Between this activities the more usually confused with roleplay are “simulation” activities. Simulation is an activity that consist on create the pretence of a real life situation in the classroom, like role-play, but there is an important difference: in both activities the students can act like themselves, but only in role-play teacher can ask the student to act like a policeman, a shop assistant, or a retired person. On the other hand, it is in role-play where the students can be asked to defend some opinions that they never would defend. To sum up, if we put the student in an artificial situation acting like himself/herself and without a specific vocabulary, we are doing a simulation exercise.
3. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF ROLE-PLAY 3.1. ADVANTAGES: 1. Maximum Student Activity: For role-play to be fully successfully, each student should be active almost 100% of the time, coherent speech requires a great deal of mental activity using above all speaking and listening. Few classroom activities require this high level of mental activity, i.e. in “drills”, “pair practice”, etc. the student, when not actually speaking, need not give full attention to the exercise and if he / she makes a mistake, he / she is stopped and asked to repeat the correct version. 2. Relevance, interest and discipline: Traditionally, role-play have not been seen, from a discipline point of view, a good idea. If a class can be unruly when seated, the situation is probable to become chaotic if the students are permitted to wander “at wild” round the classroom. But in fact, when the students do a role-play chosen to suit their own interests, experience and needs, they are using the language himself without the direct control of the teacher. If we make the activity interesting for the children and we choose relevant topics, the motivation increase and the students involves himself in his learning process. In this case discipline will not be a problem. 3. Mixed ability groups: Role-plays offers you the possibility of mix students with different communicative competence. But you must considerate that children who are shy in their mother tongue, will be shy too in English, so you must create special roles for them to get they more self-confidents. On the other hand, you can change the characteristics of a role-play to adapt it at your students abilities, i.e. a “slower” student could be given more detailed notes so that he had some support during the activity. Finally, there are many ways of relating role cards and role preparation to the abilities to the individual students.
3.2. DISADVANTAGES: 1. Organization: Few teachers work in ideal circumstances. Normally classrooms are too small and numerically too large, the furniture inadequate and equipment almost non-existent. It can be suggested that role-play groups be placed in extra-rooms, because the noise level produced may be so high as to make concentration impossible. Other possibility would be that two or three role-plays groups can be arranged and the rest of the class given another task. With care selection and a little imagination many practical problems are not insurmountable. 2. Time: It is true that this kind of activity requires a lot of time in preparation and in development, normally we can spend three or four hours making the role-play. But if we want to get communicative competence, functional language skills, oral fluency, etc we must spend any time we need in it.
4. FURTHER POINT FORCONSIDERATION 4.1. THE TEACHER NEW ROLE. The teacher´s role during the role-play phase should be as unobtrusive as possible. There are two ways in which it can be done: -
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The teacher can sit somewhere to hear what is going on, (i.e. he can look out the window but making mental notes) or moving quietly round the room when it was necessary. The teacher can observe a role-play and to take a role himself / herself. Inside the activity the teacher can not take the major role or he nay become the dominating personality.
4.2. THE TEACHER´S AND STUDENT´S ATTITUDES It is very important that student involve in the choice of materials and learning activities, suggesting topics and ideas for class and group work to make the process more motivating, also open-ended exercises resemble real communication and the teacher´s attitude in more tolerant. In order to get good result it is necessary to less a formal classroom arrangement and management. You must order the space according with the activity. But the changes must be gradually because children have fixed views on “good” classroom practise where the teacher is the undisputed authority. If all the changes take place at once, students will became confused and uncertain.