Role Play Activities: An Innovative Approach to Teaching Speaking Skills in an ESL Classroom

Abstract

Encouraging students to speak during classroom activities is an effective strategy to improve their acquisition of the target language. Activities related to real life situation such as role play, debate and simulation provide substantial rehearsal and practice and they allow students to not just learn phrases, but also learn how to communicate in various circumstances. Recent studies have revealed that students who are exposed to learning using role play activities improve significantly in speaking competency. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate how role play activities in an ESL classroom can be an innovative approach in improving students’ speaking skill. A total of nine undergraduate students from the Faculty of Computing in a public university in the Southern region of Malaysia were involved in this study. The main purpose for choosing the students as participants of the study was due to their low English proficiency based on their MUET results. The instruments used in this study were observation checklist and questionnaire. All the findings were tabulated and analysed qualitatively (observation checklist) as well as quantitatively (questionnaire). From the analysis carried out, it was evident that the students made positive improvement particularly in fluency, comprehension, context, and interactive communication. Besides that, the students felt that role play activities had brought positive effects on their English-speaking skills as obtained from the results of the questionnaire. Thus, it can be deduced that role play activities do have positive effects on students’ English-speaking skills.

Applying Active Learning Strategies to Develop the Professional Teaching Competency of Chinese College Student Teachers in the Context of Geography Education

“…More specifically, all three dimensions of the professional teaching competence, including professional knowledge, designing teaching competence, and implementing teaching competence, had progressed after the intervention. This result corresponds to that of previous research that active learning was beneficial for student teachers as it helped them to understand and develop their professional knowledge (Niiranen et al, 2020;Demirci & Akcaalan, 2020;Ishii, 2017) and improve their teaching competence (Togimin & Jaafar, 2020;Niemi et al, 2016), e.g., developing their teaching materials (Laksana et al, 2019) and implementing and practicing the theories they have learned (Namli AltKaraaslan, 2019).…”

“…Researchers have found that active learning can effectively stimulate the students' interest, improve their learning engagement and performance, and significantly develop their competence (Cavanagh, 2011;Togimin & Jaafar, 2020;Chen et al, 2020). As a key achievement, the student teachers' professional teaching competency is influenced by active learning strategies, such as autonomous group work, cooperative learning, and problem-solving (Niemi et al, 2016;Virtanen et al, 2017).…”

Role Play to Improve ESL Learners’ Communication Skills: A Systematic Review

“…They will be able to communicate ideas as they are put in a situation where they are simulating certain real-life situation or role-playing characters in real life. As mentioned in the findings of study by Togimin and Jaafar (2020), role plays as activities in the classroom trained the students to express themselves and as a result, they managed to speak their sentences smoothly without any interruption from fillers or pausing. Role-playing, according to Kusnierek (2015), is an expressive activity that can offer ample experience and practice to ESL students of probable circumstances or events that they may meet in life.…”

“…Speaking is a skill that requires the users to keep using the language in order for them to improve the components of the speaking skill. As seen by the research papers analysed, Bhatti (2021); Togimin and Jaafar (2020); Saad and Mansor (2019); Wulandari et al (2019) improvement in regards to speaking skill has been seen as one of the major effectiveness when implementing role play activity in classroom. Fluency, accuracy, accent and pronunciation cannot be learnt through other skills like reading and writing but it can only be acquired if the learners use the language enough to realise and rectify the mistakes that they have done before.…”

Systematic Review on Speaking Skill Teaching Approaches in the ESL / EFL Classroom: Before and During Covid 19

“…Among all, role play activity is the most popular intervention to be used as speaking task. In traditional classroom, 5 studies (Krebt, 2017;Maarof, 2018;Adiantika & Purnomo, 2018;Togimin & Jaafar, 2020;Safitri et al, 2020) set role play as the task for learners to simulate a real life situation. The results from these five studies are positive.…”