Role-playing
A very undervalued activity that fosters strong communication skills. How do you do role-plays in class?
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Much of “learning” is really done through what Frank Smith calls - “demonstrations”. People learn through the models they witness and then by copying, and emulating these. Babies learn like this, adults learn like this, and language learners especially learn like this, through copying strong examples - demonstrations.
Role-plays are strong demonstrations for the classroom. They are very practical - students practice what they’d be saying in a real situation but have the safety of a classroom to lower their affective filter and anxiety. Drama in the classroom. Also, role-plays strongly link classroom language learning with real-life situations and skills.
One thing to note - role-plays, they are not a set dialogue. Role-plays really should be creative, on the feet, communicate as well as you can, practice sessions. As close as possible to the real thing - language use in the real world.
Here are a few suggestions when doing role-plays in class.
Always model the role-play and how to do it with students. The teacher should choose a very creative, outgoing student, read out a situation and then act it out. Review with the full class.
Provide students time to prepare. Often, students aren’t ready right away to do a role-play. So in this case, provide them time to write out their dialogue beforehand.
Situation cards. Provide students with solid situations - prompts to set the stage and provide the backdrop for the role-playing scenario. Also, the situation needn’t be a card, text. Use a short video and then have students take off from there or extend the conversation from the video.
Review. Often, we just do a role-play as a one-off. Get students to repeat on other occasions their role-playing and this will help them acquire the language of the role-play.
Role-playing is for all levels. Many assume it is only for very competent second-language speakers. Not at all. Just the expectations of the language used will change with the level of the students.
Another great role-playing activity is to have students write the dialogue for a video. Then read it out when the video is playing. For example, this short animation - The Bridge. There are many suitable videos out there.
For subscribers. Download this ebook. It has prompts, situations and a preparation template for doing role-plays in the classroom.
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