When teachers plan to incorporate a role-play activity into their teaching, how to systematically guide students to it is another important issue to pay attention to.
Different procedures in using role-play are proposed by different scholars, including Richards’ (1985) six-step, Lee’s (1991) four-element, Aliakbari and Jamalvandi’s (2010) three-stage, and Maxwell’s (1997) procedure of listening, reading and videotaping.
2.3.1 Richards’ (1985) six-step procedure
Richards (1985) recommended a six-step procedure for role-play:
Organization/preliminary activity (deciding on the activity is pair or group work), a
model dialogue, learning to perform the role play with the help of role cards, listening to recordings of native speakers performing the role play with role cards, follow-up, and repeating the sequence. However, Tompkins (1998) claimed that not every step needs to be taken when teachers conduct their role-play.
2.3.2 Lee’s (1991) four-element procedure
Compared with Richards’ framework, Lee’s four elements in the procedure of role-play seem more concise, including preparation (a guide to possible use of language), selection of activity (according to students’ levels and needs), organization (an organized lesson plan), and follow-up (a discussion on students’ presentations).
Firstly, before role-play activities are performed, teachers are suggested to incorporate both “linguistic preparation” and “factual preparation” into lessons. Linguistic preparation means that students are exposed to the possible use of the language, such as related reading materials or dialogue modeling. In this way, they may have language resources to draw on. Factual preparation, on the other hand, refers to the discussion of role cards with information relevant to the task. With these preparations, students can have enough confidence in performing the tasks. The second element is to select an appropriate role-play activity based on learners’ levels, needs, and interests, so that learners can get much benefit from the practice. The third element organization means that teachers need to spend time making a careful plan for their instructions, grouping, and even the arrangement of time. Finally, in the follow-up session, teachers are recommended to hold a class discussion on the content of role-plays, students’ learning attitude, or their use of language. This session is considered valuable due to its insight on the potential improvement in language learning and teaching.
2.3.3 Aliakbari and Jamalvandi’s (2010) three-stage procedure
Aliakbari and Jamalvandi’s framework may be the most straight-forward when
compared with other procedures. They asserted that role-play, one of the most recommended task-based language teaching techniques, goes through three major stages: pre-task, during task, and post-task. The pre-task stage involves different activities before the task is started. Those activities are utilized to provide support for learners either in linguistic or factual ways, such as relevant vocabulary, sentence patterns, or background information about the task. In the second stage, students are assigned roles to play, repeatedly practice, and give presentations. The third stage provides both teachers and learners with opportunities to reflect on the task performances.
2.3.4 Maxwell’s (1997) procedures of incorporating role-play into listening, reading and video clips
According to Maxwell (1997), the procedures of role-play activities can also be clarified through listening, reading, and video clips respectively. To incorporate role-play into listening practice, teachers ask students to listen to a 45-second listening passage, answer comprehension questions, and then complete a cloze dialogue for more precise listening practice. Groups of students then practice the dialogue which they listened to at the beginning of the class; they can either memorize the dialogue or improvise the situation. Students’ mastery of linguistic competence can be thus accentuated through such practice as pronunciation, grammatical structures, and even nonverbal communication (e.g. body languages and facial expressions). At last, teachers videotape group performances and get all students to evaluate.
In combining role play with reading, groups of three or four students are given different sections of an assigned novel. Each group has to decide on two main events which they are going to perform, write a paragraph about each event, and make a list of ten new words with synonyms, antonyms, different word forms, and sentences.
When playing role-plays, students are asked to offer an introductory overview and give a presentation of new words in the very beginning. At the end of their role-plays, they have to stay in the roles of the characters and answer the questions from the audience for approximately five to ten minutes.
To incorporate role-play into teaching English with authentic video clips, teachers can have students watch a part of video about a target language situation.
Students are then asked to make a comparison between their own culture and the target culture. After that, students can watch the clip again, this time with the actual script. Meanwhile, teachers discuss linguistic elements in the script with students. In the end, students are made to practice the dialogue and give a role-play.
2.3.5 Other suggestions about procedures of role-play
In addition to the four procedures mentioned above, Raz (1985) especially emphasized that teachers can move around the class to offer timely help during role-play practices. Moreover, error corrections can be anonymously pointed out in another lesson so that students can receive opportunities for improvement and avoid the feelings of embarrassment at being corrected at the same time. Besides, confident students usually take the lead in a role-play activity. In order to give shy students more chances to practice speaking, teachers are suggested to encourage them to have a brief talk about what happened in their own groups.
Although there are different kinds of procedures of role-play proposed by scholars, Aliakbari and Jamalvandi’s (2010) three-stage procedure─pre-task, during task, and post-task, will be used in this study because it is considered a concise and complete framework.