The effectiveness of role-play on Sixth-Grade ESL learners' speaking skill and motivation

النوع : Mémoire

This quasi-experimental study was conducted to investigate the effect of role-play on Lebanese public schools students’ speaking skill and their motivation. The participants of the study were from grade six studying in a public school, and were assigned into experimental (fifty-one students) and control (twenty-six students) groups, in the 3rd district of Beirut during the academic year 2013/2014. The students lack the effective communication skills that are negatively affecting their classroom participation. The students are afraid, reluctant and not motivated to express their ideas using the L2. The study was conducted within five months: one month for the pre- and post-test, and four months for the implementation of role-play. It focused on using seventy-three different role-play situations to develop students’ pronunciation, grammatical range and accuracy, lexical resource and fluency and coherence. The instruments used in the study consisted of a motivational questionnaire to check the students’ motivation level before and after the implementation of role-play, and the BELTS speaking test to measure the learner’s initial speaking proficiency level before and after the implementation of role-play in addition to observation and meetings with the assigned class teacher. The Statistical Package for Science (SPSS) was used to analyze data. Thus we can consider it a quantitative and qualitative study. The results of the study showed that role-play was an effective technique for teaching speaking as it improved the students’ speaking sub-skills and at the same time students were motivated to express their thoughts without feeling embarrassed or hesitant in front of the teacher and classmates.