Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 103 === Language teachers around the world have been pursuing the goal of promoting students’ communicative competence, and many innovative pedagogical theories and communicative approaches have thus emerged. Among them, role-play is considered the most typical one with considerable positive effects on language learning. However, few studies have paid attention to the process of how students perceive and prepare for and how teachers conduct role-play. Furthermore, as the previous researchers interpreted the term “role-play” differently, there is little consensus on which kind of role-play is the most beneficial to students of what proficiency level. To fill these gaps, the present study aimed at exploring how students perceive different types of role-play activities and what teachers should heed when conducting different role-plays to students of different language proficiency levels. One heterogeneous class of thirty eighth-graders in a junior high school in Taoyuan were grouped into basic, intermediate, and advanced levels. Four types of role-play, from the most structured to the most creative mode, were utilized, including skeleton dialogues, cued dialogues, role instructions, and free role-play. Data were collected through questionnaires, sub-sample interviews, and teaching journals. One-way ANOVA and post hoc tests with Scheffe’s method were utilized for quantitative data analysis. Results suggested that: 1) students’ preferences and interests in role-play influenced how helpful they thought of it and whether it should be incorporated into English class; 2) students showed similar suggestions on the conduction of different types at different stages; 3) pedagogical implications with common suggestions on the conduction of role-play were presented from the three viewpoints: different stages of role-play conduction, different types of role-play, and different proficiency levels of students. The study shed light on a better understanding of students’ perceptions of different types of role-play and suggestions for conducting role-play as an instructional means in an EFL classroom.
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