Shedding the ego: drama-based role-play and identity in distance language tuition

Abstract

In this article, the authors attempt to answer the following questions: How do we understand role-play? How are role-play and identity linked? What are the purposes, benefits and challenges of role-play as a teaching tool? What are the roles of students and teachers in role-play? What does role-play add to telephone tutorials and online audio-graphic synchronous tutorials?

The article contextualises the wide range of definitions of role-play and points to Cockett's understanding of drama-based role-play as a creative and learner-centred activity in the language classroom. Identity is viewed against the background of social constructionist identity theories and Homi Bhabha's concept of the ‘third space’.

The authors explore the benefits and challenges of drama-based role-play for the psycholinguistic, cognitive and educational development of language learners and highlight the changed role of the teacher in this scenario. The comparison of drama-based role-play in face-to-face tuition with telephone as well as online audio-graphic synchronous conferencing confirms that the lack of visual cues often functions as a stimulant and an opportunity for students to shed their ego. At the same time silences take on a new dimension and might afford students a space in which to reinvent themselves in the target language. While drama-based role-play may, on the one hand, be the bridge between first language/first culture and target language/target culture, it can, on the other hand, support teachers in managing a central task of language tuition today: facilitating innovative learning experiences that allow identity formation in second language acquisition.

Notes

1. In one assessment task, where students were required to role-play finding a blind date for one of their friends, one student objected to this task saying ‘I would never dream of doing this in real life, and so I cannot do it in this TMA [Tutor Marked Assignment]’.

2. See http://www.murderetc.com.

3. See http://secondlife.com. ‘Avatar’ in computing terms stands for the ‘computer user's representation of himself or herself. The term “avatar” can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user’. Quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%28computing%29 (retrieved 31 March 2008).

4. A similar concept, called storyline telling, is put forward by Stephen Bell (2003). Bell stresses the importance of the teacher's task and points out his/her changed role in this context:

• The teacher's role is to model good learning procedures by designing good questioning techniques, in other words by example. The students are then encouraged to solve these problems imaginatively, to hypothesise and then to examine their suggested solutions by testing and research. The teacher is a facilitator, someone learning along with the students, a chairman for their discussions.

5. Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1990, 30–31) describe foreign language anxiety as having three components:

• Communication apprehension, arising from learners' inability to adequately express mature thoughts and ideas; fear of negative social evaluation arising from a learner's need to make a positive social impact on others; test anxiety or apprehension over academic evaluation.

6. Even in cases where student groups largely share the same cultural background, we do not consider that this weakens either the impact or the importance of role-play.

7. When questioned about their preferences for scenarios students expressed the view that they benefit from every-day situations just as well as absolutely fictional, entertaining plays:

• I think that many different kinds of role-play activities should be tried. However, some consideration may need to be given in order to help people get through the difficult first ‘forming’ stage. Perhaps the use of preformed ‘guide’ roles, such as choosing or drawing from a hat names which contain clues as to an appropriate role.

Another student says:

• I would prefer more likely events, such as customer/waiter conversation, in a chemist/shop, buying travel tickets maybe. I suspect what might work well is some sort of 3-minute speed-dating role-playing scenario. Or some sort of murder-mystery/cluedo game perhaps.

8. All comments were gathered in a survey with students in Open University courses in Scotland.