Students’ perception on role-play in EFL/ESL-classrooms in relation to their speaking ability

This research paper examines students’ perception of how role-play could affect their confidence in accordance with their speaking ability in EFL/ESL- classrooms. It has tried to respond to the research question “To what extent do Swedish EFL/ESL- students find role-play helpful for their confidence in their speaking ability?.” In addition, an analysis of relevant research supported the theoretical background on the subjects of Second language acquisition (SLA), Communicative language teaching (CLT), the Sociocultural perspective and the steering documents from Skolverket. Moreover, the research used a qualitative method through interviews. The interviews were performed with eight students from 7th-9th grade. To complement the study a questionnaire was conducted to show the distribution of students confidence on a scale from 1-5. The collected data was from a role-play activity that was tested similarly in six EFL/ESL-classes. At the end of the classes, they were evaluated in a Google Formula. Then, it was possible to see connections between the level of confidence and how helpful role-play was for the students. In the result, the interviewees all agreed on the role-play possibly being a helpful tool to improve the speaking ability. In addition, the questionnaire showed that 64% of the participants thought that role-play helped them to speak more confidently in English. Also, it was shown that students in the middle of the scale were the ones that found role-play most beneficial. At last, the factors that seemed to develop students’ confidence the most from the role-play were the structure of a group, the chosen themes, and the support students received from the framework