Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Role Play : A Practical Guide for English Teachers

Role play is an extremely valuable method for language learning. It encourages thinking and creativity, lets pupils develop and practice new language and behavioural skills in a relatively no threatening setting, and can create the motivation and involvement necessary for learning to occur. Although there are discouragements for example, Brumfit (1984, as cited in Al-Arishi, 1993:337) says that role plays are suitable only for intermediate adolescents or adults but not in children's language teaching programmes. According to him, it is because young learners may feel that they will lose their own identity during the activity, therefore they resist role paying. On the other hand those teachers who found role play is valuable point out that children like to play somebody else's part. The reason is that pupils and even adults usually imagine themselves in different situations. Thus using role play in the classroom is a naturally enjoyable thing. This thesis will examine this technique in details and will be included some elaborated role play activities which could be used easily and effectively at the early stage of foreign language learning with beginners or pre-intermediate pupils.