Fostering pre-service EFL teachers’ communicative competence through role-playing games

Abstract

The quality of foreign language teaching (FLT) is inextricably linked with developing students’ communicative competence (CC), a complex formation that is being comprehended by methodologists. The term “communicative competence” (CC) implies the speaker's production of grammatically correct language appropriate to various social settings while observing the linguistic and social rules of native speakers. Despite the complex structure of developing English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' CC, one of the conditions for its successful course is a systemic and technological approach to role-playing games (RPG) in teaching dialogue speech. The study aims to examine the development of EFL students' CC and the effects of RPG in teaching dialogue speech. To test the hypothesis that a systemic and technological approach to using RPG in teaching dialogue speech fosters the pre-service EFL teachers’ CC, the research methodology employed a semi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design with pre-service EFL teachers. Participants (n=36) were divided into experimental (n=18) and control (n=18) groups. The results of the posttest experiment confirmed the effectiveness of systemic and technological approaches to the use of RPG in significantly increasing the pre-service EFL teachers’ CC.