© 1994 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Role-play, real-play, and surreal-play in the ESOL classroom
presently serves as Vice-Dean, College of Education, King Saud University, Abha, Saudi Arabia, and as an Associate Professor in its Department of English. His previous publications in TESOL Quarterly, English Teaching Forum, System, Journal of Reading, and Language Quarterly deal with Lockean philosophy and ELT, applied phonology, and EFL literature.
This article seeks to answer the question of whether role-playing is gradually ‘losing its role’ in the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) programme. The first two sections discuss the hybrid nature of role-playing, how it springs from two distinct impulses in the contemporary language acquisition perspective. One impulse stresses that the activities in the language classroom should imitate the real world: here role-playing becomes ‘real-playing’. A second impulse stresses that the language classroom, in its pursuit of a deeper-than-surface realism, should promote an imaginative self-expression of the inner world of each student's mind: here role-playing becomes ‘surreal-playing’. The final section of the paper examines some possible componential artificialities of role-playing. The conclusion is that there are some valid reasons for the movement from centre stage of role-playing in the CLT programme.