Педагогические науки/5. Современные методы преподавания

Avagyan S.S.

National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”

Role Playing Methodic Typology

“Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man,

and he only a full man when he plays.”

F. Schiller

Role playing in foreign language lessons is a kind of team work which aims to develop speaking skills and ability in reality. Being one of the most effective, flexible and universal way of studying, role playing is appealed to activate the process of studying, make it more productive and develop students’ motivation further.

Role playing as the type of social-psychological training with steady didactive structure, sophisticated by means of bringing into it educational and professionally psychological aims. And what is more social-psychological and didactic condition creating, which are necessary and sufficient at achieving playing and non-playing purposes. Didactic structure of role playing is combination of its elements (purposes, contents, roles, social-psychological and didactic conditions, stage property) and parts (stages), providing it’s cohesiveness under diverse external and internal changes. Under time schedule role play is represented relatively cohesive period controlled interaction between a teacher and students, which consists of 3 stages.

The first stage is role play preparation, second is role play realization and the last is discussion of role play realization result in teams.

Today there are of all kinds of role play classifications like typology description, depending on training game purpose and task, the levels of complexity.

Commonly social welfare and professionally pedagogic role plays are highlighted. Professionally pedagogic is the type of business play.

Business play is the mean of problem situation imitation in different fields, which allows finding the optimal way of solving the problems. Thus it is the means of recreation of objective and social content of future professional activity for a specialist. Situations in business play are often unpredictable. The good business play varies with its self-education and self-organization.

R.P. Milrud and I.R. Maximov worked out an interesting typology, which includes 5 types of role plays.

1. Controlled role-play. This is the simplest play. In this type of role play students get necessary phrases and their task is to listen to each other, combine the given phrases into the context of role communication.

2. Semi-controlled role-play. This is more complicated play. In this play participants get the general description of their roles. The special aspects of role behavior are known only to the participant who plays the role but the rest of participants have to guess which line of behavior follows their partner and come to an appropriate decision of their own reaction.

3. Free role-play. Students are informed only about circumstances of communication.

4. Large-scale role-play. A row of incidents from enterprise performance is played in period of large-scale.

5. Small-scale role-play. A certain incident is played here.

The most complicated are free and large-scale role-play, where the space of initiative and creativity is opened.

Another Methodist P.K. Tompkins has an interesting position, where he underlined convergent and divergent patterns of role-play. In convergent pattern use the dialogue samples in role-play are specified, whereas in divergent type they are non-specified.

By Tompkins, in the first stage of studying during role-plays by convergent pattern learners’ proper activity is the central in the process of studying. Although specifying tentative program, tasks should be set by a teacher. Subsequent plays will be more complicated, though they are conducted in the same procedure-oriented pattern. Later, when role-plays by convergent pattern have been already conducted several times, divergent pattern could be followed, which allows students to manage the existent activity self consistently. In such role-plays learners work out their own project.

Some of the most acceptable in foreign language lessons is semi-controlled and free role-plays. In semi-controlled role-play the play program is determined by the teacher, whereas students’ task is getting ready and taking part in all planned situations. In free role-plays students get only general description of task, but the play program, its scenario and vocabulary students have to prepare individually. They have to choose the event for imitation, an appropriate speaking matter and set the participants’ roles.

In order to not reduce the interest towards role-plays, and don’t make the preparation into algorithmic practice, it is recommended to interchange types of role-plays. Due to not enough time and foreign language lessons, it is difficult to say that students can manage to prepare and conduct free role-plays individually after realizing semi-controlled one. For this case a special type of role-play i.e. scenario play in between can be provided. In preparation to the play students prepared program and scenario under the teacher’s supervision, and then they choose vocabulary support for the appropriate roles individually, in pairs or in groups.

One of the main purposes of teachers is to teach and prepare students to make them realize their foreign language and bring into life as possible in short time. For this case different innovative approaches and methods should be used in foreign language lessons. Therefore role-plays are one of the ways to use in foreign language lessons. They are quite motivated, interesting and useful for learners. Learners can imitate in different situations for their future profession using appropriate vocabulary, whereas teachers supervise and lead them by helping some grammar and vocabulary.

Reference

1. Мильруд Р.П. Методика обучения видам речевой деятельности на иностранном языке. /Мильруд Р.П.// Тамбов 19956. – 95c.

2. Tompkins P.K. Role playing/simulation./Tompkins P.K.// http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Tompkins-RolePlaying.html