Peculiarities of Role Plays in the Context of Online Education

A general topic that is touched upon is the effectiveness of using role play games in online foreign language teaching in terms of developing students’ communicative competence. In this work, there is an analysis of the influence of role-based activities in the foreign language classroom in an online format. The work first discusses the idea and effectiveness of a role-playing game as an educational task in an online learning environment, then the results of the implementation of the roleplays into online learning processes are examined. In order to investigate whether it is feasible or not to use roleplays online, working with a large number of students in one group several methods were used: experiment, observation, and survey. In order to examine the effectiveness of role-based tasks in the online format, a set of role-playing games was designed based on a Student's Book Advanced English for Humanities (Bogolepova, 2021). The exercises are connected with the Book by educational purposes, anticipated outcomes, and lexical topics (Bogolepova, 2021). At an experimental online lesson, a group of adult students was involved in these role-plays to investigate all the upsides and downsides of the method. In order to make the evaluation process less subjective, all the students and a teacher who participated in the experiment were asked to give feedback on the activity in a form of an online questionnaire.