Role Playing in Storytelling Classes and Its Impact on Iranian Young EFL Learners’ Narrative Writing

Mojgan Rashtchi,Mosayeb Moradzadehb

doi:10.17323/2411-7390-2018-4-4-65-76

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of role playing in storytelling classes on Iranian young EFL learners’ narrative writing. Forty-seven pre-intermediate young EFL learners who were within the age range of 9 and 16 participated in this study. They were members of four intact classes, which consisted of two classes of boys and two classes of girls. One class of boys and one class of girls were randomly assigned to the experimental groups and the other two to control groups. The researchers used the role-playing technique for storytelling classes in the experimental groups and only reading stories aloud for storytelling classes in the control groups. After the treatment, the Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was run to compare the four groups’ improvement on narrative writing. The results signified that the use of role playing in the storytelling classes had a significant impact on the narrative writing of Iranian young EFL learners as compared to the reading stories aloud technique. Furthermore, the findings showed that using role playing in storytelling classes enhanced learners’ understanding of the narrative writing style and patterns of the target language.

Highlights

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of role playing in storytelling classes on Iranian young EFL learners’ narrative writing
The present study aimed to examine whether the use of the role-playing technique in storytelling classes affects Iranian young EFL learners’ narrative writing
Does the employment of role plays in storytelling classes affect the narrative writing of Iranian young EFL learners? According to the authors’ hypothesis, there is no statistically significant difference between the narrative writing of Iranian young EFL learners who engage in role playing of short stories and those who read them aloud

Summary

Introduction

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of role playing in storytelling classes on Iranian young EFL learners’ narrative writing. The results signified that the use of role playing in the storytelling classes had a significant impact on the narrative writing of Iranian young EFL learners as compared to the reading stories aloud technique. The present study aimed to examine whether the use of the role-playing technique in storytelling classes affects Iranian young EFL learners’ narrative writing. One source of difficulty emerges from the fact that writing cannot be practiced through real-life conversations or situations (Raftari, Ismail, & Eng, 2016).Another severe problem in teaching writing, as pointed out by Cook (2000), is that some learners refuse to undertake any writing tasks We believe that this problem can be solved by resorting to the role-playing technique because it can encourage learners to participate in writing tasks eagerly. The results of this study suggest teachers consider the technique for teaching narrative writing

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion