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The impact of Role Play on EFL learners´ ability; a task based approach.

Language teaching requires support by more than one approach or technique. Task based approach could be defined as one effective approach that improves EFL speaking ability. On the other hand, most of EFL learners consider speaking as the most important ability, because for them speaking means, the way how they can satisfy their communicative needs. For both reasons, to know as teachers that task based learning provides to students the opportunity of practice language in real context as they would use it in the real life is to give EFL learners an attractive and creative way for learning English. The origin of this paper is based on the following question: Does role play make any considerable change on EFL speaking abilities? According to Nunan D.(2001) , traditional approaches for teaching a foreign language affects the development of speaking abilities, because these approaches are focus on written language and rules. On these kinds of aspects, teachers have to pay attention and look for authentic ways to promote the shift from grammatical competence to communicative competence. The teaching technique named role play provides students real opportunities to practice English, according to their real environment, also role plays represents for them a challenging way to develop their speaking abilities. Role play as technique can be considered as fun and motivating. To answer the previous question, does role play make any considerable change on EFL speaking abilities? A specific methodology was followed, 60 students randomly selected. The English abilities of the selected students were an essential aspect, because before to apply an instrument the homogeneity of their English abilities, it was considerate as indispensable. IELTS speaking measure was implemented based on the score the students were ranked from the highest to the lowest. They were 40 female and 20 male students and their ages go from 18 to 30 years old. The materials used were cards that contained different roles. The cards contained roles about topics that the students knew in previous classes. After this, students were interviewed about general questions as: Their hobbies, their families, likes and dislikes and other general information about them. Fifty percent of the students showed more confident talking about themselves in English. The participants were comfortable using English in real context and according to their lives. The participants did not have experience working with roles cards and interviews. This research can be considerate a quantitative research, because it was noticeable the number of participants that could improve their speaking abilities through role play technique. This information helps teachers in Mexico, because through role play technique teachers can know how to improve their students´ speaking skills in a different way. These kinds of academic papers show how many options a teacher can apply in a classroom for improving the teaching learning process about speaking and the importance of authentic contact with English. Also show EFL students, how to use English in order to satisfy their communicative needs. For many EFL students at the beginning of any English course, their main goal is to speak and go beyond to grammatical structures.

REFERENCE Aliakbari, M and Jamalvandi, B. (2010). The impact of role play on EFL learners´speaking ability; a task-based approach. Journal of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, 14(1), 15-29 Retrieved from http:// www.paaljapan.org/conference/journals.html