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Role-Playing
for Inhibited Students in Paternal Communities
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In such paternal communities as Saudi Arabia,
students belong to families where the authority of the father is so great that he is the
domineering figure in the household. Submission is usually expected from the wife and the
children, and arguing with the head of the family is generally viewed as disobedient and
even ill- mannered. Similarly, elder members of the family most often dominate the younger
members. It follows that children usually tend to be inhibited in the presence of their
elders in general and their fathers in particular and are often reluctant to participate
in discussions while shunning communicative interaction and sociolinguistic exchanges.
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Consequently, Saudi students usually seem
inhibited, timid, and hesitant. Most of the teachers assume the father's role; they tend
to be authoritative, domineering, and are the main source of information. They lecture
most of the time and do not allow class participation and student- teacher communicative
interaction. This reflects negatively on the learning process in general and on foreign
language learning in particular. Specifically, the spoken English of the majority of Saudi
students is unsatisfactory as their communicative language skills remain undeveloped.
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This paper is, therefore, an attempt to
highlight classroom role-playing as a psychological aid which fosters self-confidence in
inhibited, timid, hesitant, and passive students and relieves them of their paternal
communicative limitations. It also proposes an overall strategy for role-playing as an
effective communicative activity that teachers can exploit to help students break the ice
and participate in language classes so as to develop their speaking/communicative skills
in an interesting and rewarding manner. Our underlying assumption in planning this
strategy is that if students enjoy their learning experience, they will be highly
motivated, will be willing to participate, and will learn better. The progression can be
depicted as follows:
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Fun - Motivation - Participation - Learning
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Role-playing activities, which range from
telling a story to acting out a specific situation, have been a significant breakthrough
in language learning (Robinson 1981). Role-playing stimulates realistic conversation and
effective communication in foreign language learners in particular. It fosters interaction
in the classroom as learners free themselves from social constraints that hamper the
development of their communicative linguistic skills and the way they relate to their
teachers. Once students see the new role or identity a situation as real, they will be
motivated to produce real life language. Furthermore, role-playing helps students achieve,
as Burges (1992:20) puts it, "a greater understanding of their own society. (as well
as) greater cross-cultural understanding."
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Before undertaking role-playing activities,
teachers have to attempt to help students relax. Psychologically speaking, students'
attitudes towards classroom participation in general, and role-playing in particular, need
to be corrected. Contrary to what they might have experienced in their paternal families,
they need to be convinced that they have an active role in determining the shape and
extent of their learning in the classroom, and that their active class participation
contributes to their learning.
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Students also need to be encouraged to feel at
ease when role-playing. To accomplish this, the teacher must emphasize the enjoyment of
the role-playing activity, and encourage the students to enjoy it. The teacher should
start the session with a warm-up activity to create a relaxed, friendly atmosphere before
going into the actual performance. This may include, for example, cracking a joke, reading
a comic strip, or getting a talented student to mime. The teacher must lower the affective
filter by assuring students that no penalties will be imposed on them for hesitations,
mistakes, or other failures. S/he should tolerate their resistance, and should not expect
positive responses right away. Further encouragement can be provided by giving them
regular feedback on their performance. In this respect, role-playing activities may be
taped or televised so that students may play them for self evaluation and correction.
Taped roleplays by former students may also be demonstrated to them, graded from weak
performances to satisfactory ones, to emphasize that "you can do it."
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For role-playing activities to impress students
and be effective in developing their communicative skills, the subject matter should be
selected very carefully. Much of the hesitation on the part of students towards
role-playing may be related to the dialogue itself. A dialogue may be silly and/or
difficult to understand, or culturally offensive. It may also be lengthy, and timid
students would not risk participating in lengthy role- playing dialogues lest they err and
become embarrassed in front of their colleagues.
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The teacher should, therefore, make sure that
the subject matter of the dialogue is interesting to the students and culturally
inoffensive. It will be useful to start with situations from the first language cultural
context and lead gradually to English language situations. The teacher should also start
with simple language dialogues, and then proceed gradually to advanced material. In cases
where the teacher finds it advisable to simplify useful dialogues, the teacher should do
so carefully so as to maintain the gist of the dialogue. Lengthy dialogues may be divided
into smaller episodes to be performed in different sessions or by different groups in the
same session.
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To capture the students' interest and attention,
role-playing dialogues must be varied in content, style, and technique. They may be, for
example, comic, sarcastic, persuasive, or narrative. Exemplary role-playing techniques
that are useful and enjoyable to students and which encourage students to use their
linguistic reservoir in a favorable life-like manner are the following: TV stories,
pictorial situations, cloze dialogues, and student scenarios .
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In a TV story, students watch a videotaped TV
story without sound. They improvise what the actors say. The videotape is replayed with
sound for comparison and corrections. Students may listen to the first oral segment on the
tape to get background information about the dialogue they will role-play.
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In a pictorial situation, students are shown a
picture of a life-like situation with a number of people talking to each other. They study
the situation suggested by the picture and act it out, improvising the scenario.
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In a cloze dialogue, the teacher selects a
dialogue with two or more speakers. Every second or third oral exchange is left blank
except for the first and last two/three oral exchanges, which are left intact. Students
examine the dialogue to familiarize themselves with it, and they role-play it, filling in
the gaps with appropriate oral responses.
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In student scenarios, students are divided into
groups, with a fairly good student in each group as a leader. All groups are given the
same situation/background information and are asked to build up their own scenarios for
the situation. A panel of student judges will choose the best scenario(s) to be
role-played by the respective group(s).
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Here, it is worth noting that the gender of the
participants in the dialogue poses a serious problem in a paternal community. Saudi
students, for example, find it embarrassing, to play the role of a character of the
opposite sex. This is not as much chauvinism as it is a social value fed by the
conventional sex segregation common in schools as well as in other aspects of social life.
Here, the teacher should attempt to overcome this problem by doing the following:
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- playing the role of the opposite sex him/herself at the beginning, then asking daring
and more willing students to play these roles and calling later upon hesitant students to
play such roles.
- using roles of the opposite sex, especially feminine roles, in appropriate sociocultural
contexts, and avoiding culturally offensive roles such as the roles of girlfriends,
waitresses, bartenders, etc.
- using sex-neutral roles such as the roles of teachers, secretaries, doctors, managers,
etc.
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As for students' errors while role-playing, the
teacher should concentrate at the beginning on overall performance and encourage students
to participate without interrupting their performance repeatedly to correct grammar and/or
pronunciation errors. Only errors that impede communication should be corrected. Grammar
and pronunciation errors may be corrected later in another session to avoid embarrassing,
discouraging, or inhibiting participants.
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To conclude, drawing out timid, inhibited
students in paternal communities is really a challenging task for foreign language
teachers. A teacher in such communities is, therefore, strongly recommended to design and
exploit language activities that initiate self-confidence in inhibited students and
encourage them to participate confidently and successfully in class. Role-playing as
highlighted above meets the communicative needs of such students and stimulates their
linguistic competence for spontaneous performance. It also reinforces the students'
self-confidence for classroom learning activities in other subjects as they start to
realize that they do understand and can be understood. Further, it builds up the students'
confidence for future real-life situations when they put their English to actual use
because they will have then, as Burges (1992:20) points out, "become accustomed to
thinking on their feet."
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Abdullah
I. Al-Saadat is an associate professor of TESOL and ex-chairman of the Department
of Foreign Languages at King Faisal University.
Elhami A. Afifi is an associate professor in the College of
Education, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia. He has taught in Egypt, Kuwait, and the
United States. |
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Return
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- Burges, P. 1992. Improvisational acting and language learning. English Teaching Forum,
30, 4, pp. 20-23.
- Robinson, P. G. 1981. Role-playing and class participation. English Teaching Forum, 35,
4, pp. 384-386.
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