Improving Students’ Fluency through Role-Playing

Abstract

One of the current approaches to teaching second or foreign languages is the communicative approach. People communicate and negotiate meaning daily and in different ways. They manage to make themselves understood and understand their addressees. Hence, communicative activities make use of real-life situations which necessitate communication. Consequently, teachers manage situational activities in the classroom in order to foster learners’ motivation to participate in a task, to interact with the others and use the target language efficiently. This research work deals with intermediate adult learners from Sibawaih School of foreign languages. Students are intrinsically motivated and in a steady will to learn foreign languages, mainly the English language. They come to the private school for intensive courses not only to learn and study the structure of the subject matter; but to improve their speaking skills and fluency. One of the difficulties faced by learners apart from their acquisition of grammatical structures and vocabulary words; lies in a lack in their speaking skills. They feel inadequately prepared to interact with others and communicate. Consequently, this research work fosters the use of communicative drama activities such as role-play which helps enhance the learners’ speaking skills. Learners are more motivated to learn by performing. Hence role-play is a technique which provides them with a context of real-life situation as they are likely to be faced with in the real world. Simulating often starts with a text, a situation more or less imposed as a game. The experiences as observed will show that imagination soon takes over, and what started as a prescribed game turns into ad hoc verbal interaction, through dialogues that are performed as real situations, a kind of “Happening”. Adult learners go to private schools of languages for different reasons. They are all intrinsically motivated since they want to fulfil the task of speaking the target language fluently. Throughout this humble research work, it is assumed that learners have acquired the grammatical structures of the English language. Yet, they are unable to communicate fluently. Therefore, the use of role-play as a communicative drama activity means to answer this contradiction and helps learners experiment an innovative technique that should contribute to the improvement of their oral skills.