Role Play in Teaching Culture: Six Quick Steps for Classroom Implementation
Maria A. Kodotchigova
Abstract
As language and culture are interrelated, language cannot be taught without culture, but there are many ways of co-teaching language and culture. One of them is role play. This paper addresses the issue of role play in teaching foreign language and foreign culture. It introduces a step-by-step guide to making up a successful role play and examines role play in preparing learners for intercultural communication.
Introduction
There are different ways of teaching second/foreign language (L2) culture. One of them is a role play. Though the concept of role play is not new, scholars did not find agreement on the definition of the terms. Such words as role play, simulation, drama, and game are sometimes used interchangeably, but, in fact, they illustrate different notions. Some scholars believe that the difference between role play and simulation is in the authenticity of the roles taken by students. Simulation is a situation in which the students play a natural role, i.e. a role that they sometimes have in real life (e.g., buying groceries or booking a hotel). In a role play, the students play a part they do not play in real life (e.g., Prime Minister, Managing Director of a Multinational Company or a famous singer). The other scholars consider role play as one component or element of simulation (Greenblat, 1988; Crookall & Oxford, 1990). Thus, in a role play, participants assign roles which they act out within scenario. In a simulation, emphasis is on the interaction of one role with the other roles, rather than on acting out individual roles. One way, or the other, role play prepares L2 learners for L2 communication in a different social and cultural context.
In this paper, I decided to express my understanding of teaching culture with a role play and I will use the term ãrole playä to determine a teaching technique in which the students are asked to identify with the given familiar or non-familiar roles and to interact with the other role characters within the given sociocultural situation.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Making a Role Play
There have already been some attempts to introduce a guide to making up a role play (Shaw, Corsini, Blake & Mouton, 1980; Milroy, 1982; Livingstone, 1983; Rodriguez & White, 1983; Horner & McGinley, 1990). Scholars suggest different steps and various successions in applying role play in teaching. Based on the empirical evidence, we suggest our step-by-step guide to making a successful role play.
Step 1 - A Situation for a Role Play
To begin with, choose a situation for a role play, keeping in mind students` needs and interests (Livingstone, 1983). Teachers should select role plays that will give the students an opportunity to practice what they have learned. At the same time, we need a role play that interests the students. One way to make sure your role play is interesting is to let the students choose the situation themselves. They might either suggest themes that intrigue them or select a topic from a list of given situations. To find a situation for a role play, write down situations you encounter in your own life, or read a book or watch a movie, because their scenes can provide many different role play situations. You might make up an effective role play based on cultural differences.
Step 2 - Role Play Design
After choosing a context for a role play, the next step is to come up with ideas on how this situation may develop. Students` level of language proficiency should be taken into consideration (Livingstone, 1983). If you feel that your role play requires more profound linguistic competence than the students possess, it would probably be better to simplify it or to leave it until appropriate. On low intermediate and more advanced levels, role plays with problems or conflicts in them work very well because they motivate the characters to talk (Shaw, Corsini, Blake & Mouton, 1980; Horner & McGinley, 1990). To build in these problems let the standard script go wrong. This will generate tension and make the role play more interesting. For example, in a role play situation at the market the participants have conflicting role information. One or two students have their lists of things to buy while another two or three students are salespeople who don`t have anything the first group needs, but can offer slightly or absolutely different things.
Step 3 - Linguistic Preparation
Once you have selected a suitable role play, predict the language needed for it. At the beginning level, the language needed is almost completely predictable. The higher the level of students the more difficult it is to prefigure accurately what language students will need, but some prediction is possible anyway (Livingstone, 1983). It is recommended to introduce any new vocabulary before the role play (Sciartilli, 1983).
At the beginning level, you might want to elicit the development of the role play scenario from your students and then enrich it. For example, the situation of the role play is returning