By contextualising language through role play, teachers can make English language classroom activities more meaningful and engaging. Introducing role play into your teaching programme offers opportunities for learners to learn key vocabulary and back-and-forth turn-taking techniques and apply them to a specific context relevant to their lives.
By definition, role plays are informal, game-orientated dramatisations by learners of various real-life scenarios and activities (Gordon, 2012). As a teaching and learning strategy, role play can be an effective tool, promoting a peer-based, informal learning environment that allows for the use of home language and translanguaging to occur. If the assessment criteria is clear and concise, it can also be an effective assessment tool. This article will provide you with recent research on this teaching technique for language learning and provide you with a lesson you can use in your classroom.
Warm ups
Depending on factors such as the age group you are teaching and their familiarity to their peers, group learning activities can initially feel awkward. Occasionally, you’ll need to spend some time getting your learners talking and feeling relaxed in each other’s company.
Learning Village offers plenty of offline games encouraging oral communication in small groups. Games like Snap or Two Truths and a Lie can be a great warm up to get groups talking while maintaining a light, fun learning environment.
Use of Home Languages and Translanguaging
Home languages matter and encouraging the use of your learners' home languages in the classroom can benefit their language learning in many ways. The use of role play in classrooms can encourage student agency and autonomy in the form of using their first language during informal interactions in a structured way, scaffolded by their peers and teachers.
According to Zhang (2025), teaching strategies such as translanguaging can foster inclusivity and confidence in ELLs. Translanguaging can be described as ‘how bilinguals flexibly use their entire linguist repertoires’ (Conagarajah, 2011, as cited by Lopez, et. al., 2017). This explanation illustrates the flexibility of the learner’s language abilities and how they can be engaged to be a useful tool for learning.This Translanguaging in Teaching video and a Translanguaging in Teaching article give ideas on how you can introduce this approach in your classroom using Learning VIllage.
Assessment
Learning language in a familiar context is a very important part of the SLA process and the same is true for an assessment task. According to Warrington et. al. (2018), having a written script to go along with vocabulary questions helps ELLs to understand the questions with more clarity. This activity aids learners’ understanding as the word in question is written within a sentence. The learner is required to look at the picture, read the word in the context of a short sentence, and gather the meaning of the word in question. The fact that visual aids are included in each question is an important feature of this assessment, as learners will be using visual cues as a skill to enable them to understand text.
Peer assessment can also be a powerful tool when assessing learners in an EAL classroom. Oral feedback is one form of peer assessment and it can be successful for younger and older learners alike, with teacher modeling and some suggestions or guidelines for helpful feedback. For older learners, teachers can aim to get more detailed results. In this case, it does require a structured approach and clear instructions for learners to follow, with assessment criteria and a marking schedule.
A lesson you can try
In the resource accompanying this article is a lesson involving role play that is focused on language skills used in speaking informally at the beginning of class, as this can be one of the most challenging communication events of the learners’ school context. The target language skills necessary include greetings, asking about their classmate’s weekend, turn taking, and responding with vocabulary provided. The lesson is designed to encourage participation in an authentic context. It employs simple language structures and includes a peer assessment speaking activity to ensure that the learners are engaged throughout the lessons and have agency in their language learning journey. This lesson is geared towards older learners.
The materials created for this lesson are based on real-life situations that the learners encounter in their school lives on a regular basis, such as an informal chat with a classmate. Role play situates the learners in a classroom, encouraging participation from all learners to apply their learning in a small-group situation. According to Wright (2013), ‘from a linguistic perspective, role play requires learners to use opening gambits, incorporate turn taking strategies…’ (p.54). These are language features of spoken English that are in focus for this lesson.
When role plays are employed as an assessment task, teacher or peer assessment can be used to boost learner autonomy and encourage engagement between learners.To ensure the learners are able to engage in the assessment task, the language used is clear, simple, and easy to access. The learners will receive a checklist (link to checklist) of assessment criteria to assess their classmates. To assess their informal interpersonal speaking skills, it includes criteria such as use of vocabulary, turn taking, and confirmation checks for understanding.
References:
Gordon, T. (2012). Using Role-Play to Foster Transformational and Social Action Multiculturalism in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Journal, 3(4), 698–721. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.32
Lopez, A. A., Turkan, S., & Guzman-Orth, D. (2017). Assessing multilingual competence. Language Testing and Assessment. Encyclopaedia of Language and Education, Springer, Cham , 91-102.
Warrington, A., Graeber, L., White, H., & Saxton, J. (2018). Finding value in the process: Student empowerment through self-assessment. English Journal, 107 (3), 32-38.
Wright, R. (2013). How To Write ESP Materials : Training Course for ELT Writers.
Zhang, Yuhan. (2025). Student L1 use in culturally diverse ESL classroom. Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences. 60. 319-329. 10.54097/61x7r281.
