Thinking of a fun way to improve your English? Role-play! It is an exciting activity to teach and learn English regardless of age. This activity can be enjoyable and inspiring for students to learn English in creative environment because it allows students to practise speaking in variety of conversational contexts. Either they are scripted or non-scripted role-plays, students can apply their own personal experiences when taking part in the activity. It is flexible activity where the teacher and students can choose to study specific grammar to describe their scenarios and decide which language skills they want to improve through this activity.
It is important to understand what the aim of the role-play is by preparing suitable topics for the students. Scripted role-play can be helpful for students to analyse the situation beforehand and what type of tenses they would need to use. They also can learn English vocabulary through the scripts whereas impromptu speech without script can be challenging because the students must interact quickly and spontaneously to apply what they have learned in the English class. There are many role-play topics can be conducted in classroom for good language practice, for instance:
1. Having vacation in English speaking countries
This is a great start for ice breaking in English class. Students can portray as a tourist and partner up with their classmates to create a scene and come out with hilarious ideas to act their own part. It sparks their creativity and imagination. Through this role-play, they can learn how to ask and give directions by using English preposition, phrases and learning how to interact with other people who have different languages and cultures. At the same time, this encourages them to develop social skills when collaborating with other students and think outside of the box for finding solution.
2. Interview
For adult learners, job interview topic can be useful for developing their career prospect and building their confidence in speaking English. Nowadays, all interview questions are conducted in English. Answering questions from interviewer, negotiating with candidate, and asking for job scope details are requiring language learner to think about usage of correct verb tenses, advanced vocabulary and answer the question without hesitation. Practicing question and answer patterns give the students an authentic feeling to imagine how the situation of the interview session would be if under stress.
3. Engage in debate or disagreement
One of the most excellent ideas to boost language use is debate! Students can form a debate team by taking turn with the members to have a discussion or argument about current issues. It is all about formal language use and they must do note-taking and researching to prepare their supporting details during the debate. Not only focusing on speaking skills but this activity helps to practise writing, listening, and reading skills too. In addition, it provides good practice for student to identify complex words, sentence structures and teach them to use the English language professionally in formal settings. It is thrilling way to teach students on how to agree and disagree in English.
Teacher can implement role-play activity in the English lesson since the key benefits of role-playing helping the students learn to use correct grammar, enhance new vocabulary, and improve pronunciation. This also motivates students to express, experiment and explore their own ideas from different perspectives. Role-play offers opportunity for the students to take part actively in language learning and understand how language work in many situations thus relates it with real life situations. Most importantly, it is effective way for developing language use to strengthen the English fluency and put their knowledge into practice.
