The Function Of Role Play In Cultivating Junior Students' Oral English Capability

Nowadays English is playing a more and more important role on the international stage. The oral communication ability of English is also becoming important, thus, the learning of oral English is given more attention. In the recent ten years, the English education in China, especially the foundation education has developed greatly. The teaching quality has also improved greatly. But for a long time, influenced by test-oriented education, there exists quite a lot of problems for English teaching in high school: teachers pay more attention to the knowledge induction than the language practice. The teaching of oral English in high school hasn't been given enough attention, and there are actual difficulties in the teaching work. Such as the environment of English-study is not ideal enough, the opportunities of hearing English is quite few, the influence of the number of the classmates, the influence of mental state of the students, etc.The capability of oral English is not only correlates with the student's control of language knowledge, but also has relationship with the characteristics of the students' background knowledge and mental character. How to improve the students' capability of oral English? How to solve difficulties mentioned above? As for me, in addition to strengthen the training of the language knowledge, role play can help students a lot.The language is the tool of social communication and the way of thinking. Language ability can only be acquired by communicating with others or thought exchanges. Role play is such a kind of classroom activity, which students utilize new and old knowledge to create new environment under a certain topic and participate in part role play. This activity helps students to use what they learned to practice and improve their oral English capability under simulated situations. The process of role play is the one that transforms knowledge to ability. Usually, the moment of role play is the most excited time of students in the classroom, therefore, it is the best chance to train the student to express their abilities. Role play makes the teaching material live and makes student participate in this activity. Thus, role play is a quite efficient way to promote the learning interest of students. Not only role play is given more attention by students, but also it stimulates the students' internal desires for play and potential abilities, which leads to a sense of success.The detailed teaching of role play is categorized into three steps: presentation, comprehension, consolidation and utilization. For a long story, a teacher usually postpones the third step to the second teaching class. In the process of presentation, a teacher acts as an conductor to give students a whole idea about the story by various means, such as, multi-media power point. Usually such kinds of vivid ways grasp the students' attention deeply. In the process of comprehension, a teacher checks if the students understand the content of teaching by questions. In the third step, students participate in the communicational dialogue and role play. In this process, the students play as dominant actors organized by the teacher. So students can practice English in the following ways: perform the original dialogues in the texts or revised ones, illustration and presentation, repetition paragraph by paragraph, theatric performance, and revised English songs etc.A comparative experiment has been taken by two classes. It dedicates from the experiment that the oral competence of students, who usually proceeds with role play, is actually improved greatly. Moreover, role play promotes the listening, reading, and writing skills of the students, stimulates the learning interest. It proves that role play indeed improves the oral English competence of high school students.