Setting Up and Staging Role Plays in Business English Lessons

1. Introduction

Although role plays are a staple form of practice in both the general and business ELT classroom, it could be argued that such practice has a greater relevance in business English. After all, BE learners often want to be able to perform certain tasks at work better using English, e.g., meetings, telephone calls, customer support, negotiations, etc. It’s therefore essential that what they practise in the classroom is relevant and reflects what they need English for in real life. Role plays are often the logical manner in which to do this, and just as importantly, they can be fun and engaging for our students.

In this article we’ll look at some key classroom issues and how we can set a role play up more effectively in the classroom. This is intended primarily for newer/developing teachers but hopefully some of the more experienced ones out there will find something useful here too. Although the focus is mainly on business English, everything mentioned equally applies to general English, and both face-to-face and online lessons. However, please also bear in mind the suggestions given here are primarily intended for intermediate to advanced level classes. I should perhaps make it clear that this post contains no original ideas of my own; it’s stuff that I’ve picked up from the professional development I’ve received as a teacher, research into ELT methodology, and the benefit of having knowledgeable mentors and colleagues whose insights are invaluable.

Finally, there is accompanying material for a relatively complex negotiation role play; a plan for how to stage it and set it up and a Google Jamboard to help students get familiar with the role and prepare for it. If you are new to Jamboards, it is a Google app that acts as an interactive digital whiteboard. You’ll need a Google account (a free Gmail account is sufficient) and they’ll work in any browser that supports Google’s suite of tools. There is a link to a useful video tutorial for them included in the lesson materials pdf. While the plan and materials are designed for an online lesson using Zoom, they could of course be adapted to work in a face-to-face class. It would also be advisable to read the article first before using it (especially for newer teachers) as the plan and material will then (hopefully) make more sense. You can view and download the lesson material pdf here.

2. Classroom Issues

Whilst role plays can be a great form of practice they can pose certain challenges in the classroom. I’ve outlined some key issues below:

Task setup: Depending on the role play itself, they can in general be complex to set up in the lesson. In many lessons I’ve observed, teachers tend to rush the setup and are often trying to cram it in the last ten minutes of the class. This can result in it not being as effective as it could have been. I’ve also observed them being tacked on at the end of the lesson as an afterthought or just something to practise a bit of target language. Additionally, the complexity of the roleplay situation itself can overwhelm students.
Demand on the students: Role plays can place greater cognitive demand on learners due to them often being required to produce target language on top of performing an assigned role in the task itself. They can struggle for ideas as well as language in these sorts of tasks, especially in mixed ability groups.

Time consuming: This will of course depend on the role play itself, but to do one in class as effectively as possible often requires dedicating a decent proportion of the lesson to its setup, execution, and feedback. This can be problematic if there is a lot of material to get through in the lesson, and often leads to them being crammed in as mentioned above.
Feedback: Teachers can fall into the trap of viewing a role play’s primary purpose as a means of practising a particular language point or structure and as a result evaluating how well the students performed the task mainly on their use of the target language. Correcting students’ language can also fall into the trap of correcting grammar only.

3. Task Setup and Demand on the Students

One approach to setting the role play up effectively is to break it down into a sequence of stages similar to how we would plan a lesson. Bear in mind this is one way of doing it and I’m not suggesting it’s the best or only way to go about it. However, breaking the setup into distinct stages will definitely make it more manageable for the students. A very simple sequence of stages could be the following:

Introduce/orient students to the situation of the roleplay and set the scene.
Assign students a clear role.
Students prepare for their role.
Students do roleplay.
Feedback.

The golden rule here in terms of instructions is to only tell them what they need to know at the particular stage they are on. For example, in stage 3 you only need to give the students sufficient instructions to prepare for the role, you don’t need at this stage to also give instructions for the roleplay itself. I wouldn’t even mention in stage 1 that they will be doing a roleplay task, I would just focus on setting the scene and getting them interested in the situation. This will help stop the students becoming overwhelmed and overall perform the task better. Finally, we should of course allow sufficient time for each stage, especially the content preparation.

The above suggestion is quite a basic overview. In the figure below is a more detailed framework that you could apply to setting up a roleplay in your lessons with suggestions for what to do in each stage. We’ll also look at a couple of the concepts within it, scaffolding and setting a communicative goal, in more detail.

Scaffolding

In basic (and very brief terms) scaffolding here refers to the help and support for an activity that a teacher provides that without it might make it too challenging or difficult for our students. As already mentioned, role plays are cognitively demanding, so the need for this is often crucial for them to be effective in the classroom as it can help ease the demand placed on the learners.

How much is required will of course depend on the learners themselves; their level, ability, fluency, personality types and learning preferences. By way of example, imagine setting a speaking task, where the instruction given is simply to ‘talk about one of your favourite childhood memories’. A stronger, more fluent learner might be able to do the task, but for many it would be too vague and open-ended, so therefore they might struggle not so much for language, but for what exactly to say in terms of content. A more scaffolded approach would be to set the task and some parameters to narrow the focus a little. For example, students talk about a favourite childhood memory and say:

When it happened
Where you were at the time
Were you with anyone? If so, who?
Why the memory is special to you

Bear in mind the above example task is typically much simpler than many role plays and still benefits from scaffolding – so the need for this when setting one up should be even more apparent. The framework itself is also intended to provide this by breaking the task down into manageable stages for the learners, with each stage building upon the previous one.

How much Scaffolding?

Let’s look at another example below. These are two role cards for the same task. In each one the student is an employee looking to secure a pay rise. The role play task itself would be a negotiation between an employee and their manager regarding the potential salary increase.

In version A the student has to generate quite a bit more of their own ideas compared to B. Therefore the demand placed on student B is lighter. In a mixed ability group weaker students could be assigned version B while stronger ones get A. As both students are preparing for the same role, the stronger and weaker ones could even be paired to collaborate during the content preparation stage.

You’ll notice that in version B there is still room for the student’s own ideas; one more reason they deserve a pay increase and an amount they ideally want and a minimum. If possible, there should be at least some scope for the student’s own ideas to give them more agency and investment in the task. If you were hoping to negotiate a pay rise in real life, you would have some idea of an ideal and a minimum figure.

The key thing here when dealing with mixed ability classes is to simplify the role and provide more help and support for the weaker students where possible. Of course, I cannot 100% guarantee you this would solve all the problems, especially if there is a particularly big difference in the students’ abilities but this will at least go some way towards mitigating them.

Setting a Communicative Goal / Purpose

When we give instructions to set the role play itself, it’s very important that we make sure it has a communicative goal or purpose. This should be a reason for the students to share their ideas and listen to each other in the role play with some sort of outcome that needs to be reached by the end of it. For example, if the scenario is lodging/handling a complaint, then the goal could be to come to a mutually acceptable resolution, or for the person handling the complaint to provide adequate customer care. It could be reaching some sort of agreement or consensus, e.g., agreeing on a venue and program for a business conference. In the image below are some examples of role play scenarios along with their communicative purpose/goals to give you some ideas.

Bearing in mind the above, the role play should always have an outcome or objective to be reached. They shouldn’t be used solely for the sake of practising a language structure. After all, in the business English classroom these quite often are designed to give students practice of real-life tasks they may well have to perform in their jobs when using the language, and I guarantee you that none of them have negotiation meetings at work to practise grammar, they do it to achieve an outcome of some sort.

To conclude, the communicative purpose should be the main reason for doing the task, rather than simply practising target language. Of course, we want our learners to use relevant functions or vocabulary and should absolutely encourage them to do so as it could help them do the task more effectively, but this should be seen as a means of achieving its communicative aim, not the end itself.

4. Role Plays Can Be Time Consuming

This will of course depend on the role play in question as they can range from relatively simple to quite complex in nature. There’s not much getting around the fact that generally they do require a decent proportion of lesson time to ensure the setup and execution are as smooth and effective as possible. If you only have ten or fifteen minutes at the end of a lesson for it, I would recommend doing something else that’s simpler instead and do the role play at the beginning of the next lesson where you can devote more time to it. Remember, they don’t have to be used as a final activity; they could in a subsequent lesson also serve as revision, consolidation or extra practice connected to the previous lesson’s topic.

5. Feedback

Content

As mentioned earlier, it’s easy to fall into the trap of evaluating the success of the role play mainly on how well the students’ used a certain language point. We should instead base this more on how well, or to what extent, they achieved its communicative aim. Look at it this way, if a student didn’t use the lesson’s target language in a negotiation role play, but were still able achieve a desired outcome and do so in an assertive but diplomatic manner using the English they already have, couldn’t we say that the task was overall quite successful for them? Therefore, feedback should focus on student content first. E.g., Did they reach an agreement? Did they get the salary increase they were looking for? Was the complaint resolved? Why/why not? How could they get a better result next time?

Language

Although we have been prioritising a communicative aim and basing feedback on it, it is of course still important that we give feedback on the students’ language as well. This of course can take the form of correcting grammar mistakes students made during the task, but consider not just correcting grammar. Could you upgrade their vocabulary? Reformulate their sentences to sound more natural? Another way to look at language feedback is to think about what could help them do the task better next time. Let’s look at an example below.

It’s a little rough around the edges because it was done using a powerpoint slide in real time during an online session as a virtual whiteboard. The role play task itself involved the students having a meeting to organise a team building event and they had to reach an agreement/consensus. It does contain some grammar and vocabulary corrections, however, when correcting I also elicited the function of what they were trying to express, e.g., giving an opinion, disagreeing politely, then put the categories on screen and gave/elicited suggestions for language to help students express them better and more naturally next time.

If we want to help students do the task better next time with our feedback, it can make sense to give them an opportunity to do the task again to make use of it to show improvement. In an approach known as task-based learning it’s referred to as the task-feedback-task cycle. If you do get the students to repeat the task after your feedback, there should be some variation to it. For example, the students could be assigned a new partner/new group, they could change roles, or the context of the roleplay itself could be changed, e.g., instead of negotiating a pay rise the students could negotiate better working conditions instead.

6. Conclusion

I appreciate this has been quite a lengthy post with a lot of information to process. So let’s summarise the main points:

To set up the role play it should be broken down into manageable stages and we should allow sufficient time for them in the lesson.
When giving instructions we only need to tell the students what is required for the particular stage they’re on.
Scaffolding: When students prepare their content for the role play the teacher should provide the necessary support to help students generate ideas according to their ability, and allow room for their own content.
Communicative goal: There should be a reason for the students to do the role play that isn’t simply practising a language point. There should be an outcome to reach and that should be the task’s primary focus.
Feedback: After the role play we should give feedback on the content first and base this on the communicative goal of the task. We can then give feedback on the students’ language use; corrections, upgrading, reformulation, etc. and think about what would help them do the task better next time.

We hope that you found the suggestions useful and that you have at least something you can take away and try out in your own lessons. Thanks for reading!