Role-plays attract students’ attention because of many different surprising tasks they can be given. Those surprises can stimulate fabulous consequences and put students in a variety of peculiar predicaments – all within the safe confines of the classroom, and all in the interests of practicing the target language. Role-plays can be great fun, and yet they can also be very deeply meaningful. They give students another language experience. Activities that involve real communication provide a good grounding for role-plays. The more life-like the outcome of the activity, the more committed students will be. They like to have a genuine purpose in communicating, instead of just practicing language structure in isolation. Role-play activities can therefore be an excellent source of language practice.

A language teacher can use any role with students that will encourage them to interrelate parts of the conversation in new ways[1]. He can also create new parts around a role that fit the complexity of the language material chosen for the lesson. Supported practice is provided through exercises, dialogues, and essays around each structured situation and as preparation for similar situations outside the classroom. From this, it is concluded that role-play activities offer the great opportunity for students to review, extend, and reinforce their learned language points and step into the shoes of the new concepts quickly and correctly. This helps consolidate new concepts, phrases, and logical steps to complex extensions of dialogues and language practice.

There are numerous benefits of using role-plays in a language classroom. The benefits of role-plays are divided according to the aim of the language teacher. The first aim is the communicative competence of the learners. Later, to focus on the structures of language, dealing with an issue and principles of functioning, people take the second place. Once more, communicative activities draw the attention of teachers. However, when teachers want to focus on a concept or the form of the target language, they should have different methods. In other words, they should use content-based learning. In these activities, teachers often use the context in which students are living. Stressing this, they make learners communicate by using the structures and the vocabulary, and this helps develop the communicative competence of the students[2]. Role-plays in communicative learning help teachers and students improve teaching and learning in these areas.

Language learners should generally not have to concentrate only on isolated linguistic problems. Language elements should be integrated into the process of learning to communicate. Students acquire proficiency not only in the use of language conventions, which may well be a national mixture, but they also learn communication strategies and may adopt roles that are unknown to them in their native language. Native speakers of the language find it relatively easy to distinguish one expected role from another when such formulas are poorly represented in the language and the situation is ambiguous. However, for students whose command of the language is limited, these definitions and expressions can constitute virtual obstacles that limit their ability to understand and make themselves understood. The more the language teacher knows about the students’ communication strategies, the better they can guide them in the task of mastering communication.

Setting clear objectives for any role-play activity is essential. The objectives need to be clearly connected to the content goals of the unit’s language and culture aims, as well as to the developmental language learning activities. For example, simple introductory dialogues are appropriate early in the language course. These dialogues consist of students simply welcoming each other, asking names, and greeting. In these dialogues, students are able to personalize grammar structures for their own use. The next time they "meet" the people they pretend to be in another role-play, they greet each other again with goodbyes and ask each other how they are feeling. In a second example, the content of a language unit might be about going shopping. The class period’s language learning objective is to learn the vocabulary of articles of clothing. By doing this, the students will personalize the linguistic components of learning by trying on some character attributes of that apparel[3].

The reason that these objectives are focused on student roles is based on the premise that students are most inventive when they play their personal characteristics, their unique selves. Playing as themselves freely enhances students’ relaxed involvement in the learning of linguistic items. As outwardly focused the role-play then becomes a super task characterized by creating the dialogue. Independent of the linguistic needs of the context, the role in the dialogue is important. With the structure of the prescribed dialogue, the student might not assume the required language and may be focused on linguistic and cultural norms. Moreover, it is difficult for the student to invest in the task[4].

To conclude, it is obvious that games gain importance in teaching the foreign language, which has an effective role in increasing the level of students’ success in traditional teaching. Furthermore, this style of learning will support memory effectively, raising confidence, improving fluency, and promoting team building and cooperation.

[1] Baker, J. (2014). Using role-play in language learning. The Language Teacher, 38(2), 23-26.

[2] Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1-47. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/1.1.1

[3] Kearney, M. (2013). Role play as a teaching strategy in the EFL classroom: A review of the literature. TESOL Journal, 4(1), 34-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.68

[4] Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning teaching (3rd ed.). Macmillan Education.