An Empirical Study Of Role Play In Junior High School English Listening-Speaking Classroom Teaching

Role play is often adopted in English listening-speaking classroom teaching to create a learning context and improve English learners’ language competence,However,through the observation of junior high school English listening-speaking class during the teaching period,the author finds that the current role-play teaching is superficial and insufficient in the classroom.This study is to apply role play teaching to the junior high school English listening-speaking classroom teaching trying to answer the following two research questions:(1)What is the change of students’ attitude towards their English listening-speaking class after role play teaching ?(2)Is students’ oral English proficiency improved through role play teaching? If yes,in what aspects?This study conducted a four-month experiment on 110 students in two classes of Grade Eight in Zhi Xing Middle School of Longchang.One experimental class and one control class were used to compare the role play teaching with the school’s conventional teaching.The author collected the data through questionnaires,classroom observation and tests of the students’ oral English proficiency.Before the experiment,the students’ current oral English proficiency were collected by the pre-test,and then the design of the experiment was carried out based on the preliminary results.During the experiment,the students’ learning process is monitored through the records of the students performance in and out of class.After the experiment,the post-test was conducted in both two parallel classes to see the changes of students’ oral English proficiency.Meanwhile,the questionnaire was conducted to find out the students’ attitude towards the application of role play in English listening-speaking class.The research finds that role-play teaching effectively creates a language environment close to reality and a relaxing language atmosphere for students.It arouses students’ interests in English learning,promotes students’ participation in the listening-speaking class and cultivates students’ positive emotional experience in the listening-speaking class.All in all,it changes students’ attitude to the listening-speaking class positively and improves students’ oral English proficiency.It can be seen that the application of role play in junior high school English listening-speaking classroom teaching has great significance.Nevertheless,there are still some limitations in this study,such as the short research time and the small research sample.