REVISITING THE USE OF ROLEPLAY IN DEVELOPING THE SPEAKING SKILLS OF TERTIARY LEVEL LEARNERS

The changeover from the existing methodology of talk and chalk approach for language acquisition to technology driven approaches in the educational setup is recommended for improving language skills especially speaking skills. Though technical skills are important for engineers, a diagnostic test is conducted on speaking in English for the purpose of placement at the tertiary level. Recruiters expect candidates to possess excellent communication skills to adapt to international scenario. Therefore communication skills laboratory was introduced to enable task based language learning in order to equip students with the required speaking skills. It is rightly pointed out by Byron Gong “Although task -based approaches still need much investigation both theoretically and empirically, it is believed that a task-oriented approach is a valid assessment of the productive communicative ability of the test taker” Gong 2008. And moreover the need of the hour is to establish a comfortable and low-threat learning environment which provides less anxious and more relaxed ambience for a better acquisition of the language skills. Therefore the present paper aims to discusses the importance of speaking skills for the technical students and brings forth an analytical perception of how role play emerges as a successful task based learning for improving all the four skills.