Use of role-play activities for university level

Here we are going to present some social interaction activities which can be implemented in the lessons to improve listening and speaking skills. Let us start with role play as this is a kind of activity which can display students’ creativity up to hundred percent. While choosing certain activity based on communicative language teaching, it should be always noted the objectives of the lesson and outcomes expected to be produced by students at the end of the lesson. The activity should not be only fun to do, but also should have determined aim to face lesson objectives. However, for some the wide variety of method options currently available confuses rather than comforts.

Role plays are widely used in foreign language teaching classes and sometimes it seems that students are a bit bored from them because they have practiced role plays many times covering different cases. A new way and even more challenging one is assigning dubbing role plays. The procedure is simple: teacher divides students into small groups and gives the case (for example, “at the restaurant”). Coming up from the student’ level topics of situations may vary. Students should prepare role plays within their groups as well as write a short summary of their acts. Before starting group A presents the characters of their role-play and group B decides the characters to be dubbed within their group. Once students of Group B know whose performance they should dub, Group A starts role-play. Coming up from my own experience I can say that this kind of role play activity both highly motivates students and engages them into the learning process. It challenges them to produce real situational conversation directly by watching. Teachers of foreign language can adopt dubbing activity in different ways. If preparing role-play is assigned as home task, students can be told to prepare the script of their work. Once they come with ready scripts next lesson teacher asks groups to change their scripts with each other. Teacher gives time to learn the scripts. When group1 acts, group 2 dubs using readymade script in their hands. Groups change their position: group 2 acts and group 1 dubs.

Plays are one of the role-play activities. In the case of plays, the activity that comes to mind first all is acting. Having students act out a play, or at least part of it, is a most fruitful experience. Plays are acted in front of the classroom. The activity Mehmet Ali Seven explains play activity (which is also called simulation in different sources) in following way. The teacher brings a kind of play and distributes the text of play to students. A student is assigned the part of the character to appear first. He/she is sent in front of the class to act out role from memory. Then the teacher assigns more roles by whispering into the students’ ears and sends these characters on stage in order of their appearance in the play. The activity then keeps going without any direct interference from the teacher. The students act according to their roles and thus know more or less what to say along the lines of events in the play. Teacher only sends new characters or replaces the student in action by another student from audience.

One more type of role-playing is possible when it is assigned as homework. Teacher asks students to prepare role play (teacher beforehand prepares real life situations) and shot their acting. First, students play the video of their role-play without voice and ask group mates to guess what it is about. Then they play it again with voice and the third time they watch the video with the script of it. This activity is very beneficial for students as they get chance to evaluate their listening skills: how much they can understand when they watch it the second time without scripts comparing to the third type when they watch with script. It is obvious that CLT activities provide students with communicative competence by practicing all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Another way of making role plays and dialogues more interesting is requiring students to record their voice. It is better to do this type of activity as home task because it may require students some further preparation ( for example, students may need to find appropriate place with either quite or noisy background). It gives students chance to show their creativity up to the highest levels. As we know, when students make dialogues or act, they usually do not notice their mistakes in aspects like pronunciation, grammar, word usage, and sentence structure. But this kind of activity is useful as students listen their conversation and can notice their own mistakes. Moreover, by listening to their own speech they may evaluate how natural it sounded, their intonation and voice projection. The same technique can be used for debates or discussions on certain topic. Teacher records the twenty minutes discussion and then welcomes students to analyze their speech. Students listening skills improve better as they listen not only others’ speech but also their own recognizing those mistakes which they would not be able to notice while producing process.

As it is written above communicative language speaking method with variety of techniques and activities covered faces the improvement of the students’ social skills. Using the techniques described we create an atmosphere where students can analyze their peer’s speech as well as their own. They highly involve students to the learning process positively influencing students’ language acquisition and leading to the progress of their all language skills.