Role Play Activities: An Innovative Approach to Teaching Speaking Skills in An EFL Classroom Language Center

Abstract

Encouraging students to speak during class activities is an effective strategy to enhance their acquisition of the target language. Activities that relate to real-life situations such as role-playing,

debates and simulations provide substantial practice and practice and allow students to not only learn phrases, but also learn how to communicate in a variety of circumstances. Recent research reveals that students who take part in learning using role-playing activities improve significantly in speaking competence. Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate how role-playing activities in EFL in Language Center 1 speaking classes can be an innovative approach in improving students' speaking skills. A total of 17 Language Center 1 speaking students were involved in this research. The main purpose of selecting students as research participants was because of their low English language skills based on the pre-test results. The instruments used in this research were observation checklists and questionnaires. All findings were tabulated and analyzed qualitatively (observation checklist) and quantitatively (questionnaire). From the analysis carried out, it appears that students experienced positive improvements, especially in fluency, understanding, context and interactive communication. In addition, students felt that role playing activities had a positive impact on their English language skills as obtained from the results of the questionnaire. Thus, it can be concluded that role playing activities do have a positive impact on students' English language skills.