Role play in the teaching and learning of English in Tanzanian secondary schools: the case of Jangwani girls secondary school

The study was aimed at looking into some aspects of the role of role play in the teaching of English language in Tanzanian Secondary Schools with English Language Teaching (ELT) at Jangwani Girls' Secondary School being taken as a case in point. It involved 3 teachers of English and 70 students in Form III. It was designed to investigate the use of role plays in the teaching and learning of English in Secondary School. Two hypotheses guided the study - students who have been taught using role play tend to show more improvement in language competence in a communicative test than others, and students would show more improvement in their use of both receptive skills and production skills where role play is used as opposed to where role play is not used. Through questionnaires, interviews, and audio tapes of the lessons in the classrooms, the findings showed that role plays were rarely used by the teachers. In the classes which used role plays the learners had more chance to practise the target language, were critical to their answers and monitored their sentences more effectively than their counter-parts who did not use role plays. The test given after the use of role play showed that there was more improvement in the experimental group than in the control group. Similarly, with the use of role play, the learners had more chance to express themselves meaningfully. The role plays had an impact on both receptive and production skills. The learners were alert in listening and were ready to respond to the situations. In writing the learners in the experimental group used some of the phrases and vocabulary they had used in role playing. The study concludes by recommending that role plays should be used in schools so as to improve the teaching and learning of English.