Лебідь О.М., Гроза М.Е.

Херсонский государственный аграрный университет, Украина

The role-playing as a means of meeting communicative needs for spontaneous performance of hesitant, passive and inhibited students

This paper is an attempt to highlight classroom role-playing as a psychological aid, which fosters self-confidence in hesitant and passive students and relieves them of their paternal communicative limitations. It also proposes an overall strategy for role-playing as an effective communicative activity that teachers can exploit to help students break the ice and participate in language classes so as to develop their speaking communicative skills in an interesting and rewarding manner. Our underlying assumption in planning this strategy is that if students enjoy and are interested in their learning experience, they will be highly motivated, will be willing to participate, and will learn better. The progression can be depicted as follows:

Interest / Fun – Motivation – Participation – Learning

As for it role-playing stimulates realistic conversation and effective communication in foreign language learners in particular. It fosters interaction activity in the classroom as learners free themselves from social and psychological constrains that often hamper the development of their communicative linguistic skills and the way they relate to their teachers. Once students see the new role or identity a situation as real, they will be motivated to produce real life in language.

Before undertaking role-playing activities, teachers have to attempt to help students relax. Students also need to be encouraged to feel at ease when role-playing. To accomplish this, the teacher must emphasize the enjoyment of the role-playing activity, and encourage the students to enjoy it. The teacher should start the lesson with a warm-up activity to create a relaxed, friendly atmosphere before going into the actual performance. This may include, for example, cracking a joke, reading a comic strip, or getting a talented student to mime. The teacher must lower the affective filter by assuring students that no penalties will be imposed on them for mistakes, hesitations or other failures. S/he should tolerate their resistance, and should not expect making good progress right away. Giving them a regular feedback on their performance can provide further encouragement. In this respect, role-playing activities may be taped or televised so that students may play them for self-evaluation and correction.

For role-playing activities to impress students and be effective in developing their communicative skills, the subject matter should be selected very carefully. Much of the hesitation on the part of students towards role-playing may be related to the dialogue itself. A dialogue may be silly and/or difficult to understand, or culturally estranged.

The teacher should, therefore, make sure that the subject matter of the dialogue is interesting to the students and culturally adopted. It will be useful to start with situations from the native language cultural context and lead gradually to English language situations. The teacher should also start with simple language dialogues, and then proceed gradually to advanced material. In cases where teacher finds it advisable to simplify useful dialogues, the teacher should do so carefully so as to maintain the gist of the dialogue.

To capture the student’s interest and attention, role-playing dialogues must be varied in content, style and technique. They may be, for example, comic, sarcastic, persuasive, or narrative. Exemplary role-playing techniques that are useful and enjoyable to students and which encourage students to use their linguistic fund of knowledge in a favorable life-like manner are the following: TV stories, pictorial situations, cloze dialogues, and student scenarios.

As for students’ errors while role-playing, the teacher should concentrate at the beginning on overall performance and encourage students to participate without interrupting their performance repeatedly to correct grammar and/or pronunciation errors. Only errors that impede communication should be corrected. Grammar and pronunciation errors may be corrected later in another lesson to avoid embarrassing, discouraging or hesitating participants.

To conclude, drawing out timid, inhibited and lacking in self-confidence students is really a challenging task for foreign language teachers. A teacher is strongly recommended to design and exploit language activities that initiate self-confidence in inhibited students and encourage them to participate confidently and successfully in class. Role-playing as highlighted above meets the communicative needs of such students and stimulates their linguistic competence for spontaneous performance. It also reinforces the students’ self-confidence for classroom learning activities in other subjects as they start to realize that they do understand and can be understood. Further, it builds up the students’ confidence for future real-life situations when they put their English to actual use.