An Investigation On Student Engagement In Role-play In English Class In Junior High School

Both the Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education(2011 Edition)and the communicative language teaching method require students to fully communicate and interact in English class,so as to achieve the purpose of learning by using and learning for using.Role-play is a good activity to meet the requirements of encouraging students to use the language to communicate.It can not only practice the vocabulary,sentence structures and grammar learnt by students,but also give students a certain degree of flexibility to promote their communicative ability and adaptability in using a foreign language.Therefore,role-play has been widely used in English teaching in junior high school.However,in some English classes,role-play is a mere formality and student engagement has considerable differences.In other words,role-play does not achieve its expected effect.This study is to discover the status quo of student engagement in role-play and the factors affecting student engagement in role-play in English class in junior high school.This study took 300 junior high school students in Xi’an X middle school as the research participants.Through analyzing the data collected by questionnaire,classroom observation and interview,the status quo of student behavioral,cognitive and emotional engagement in role-play can be found.The results showed that both student behavioral engagement and student emotional engagement were at a high level,but student cognitive engagement was at a relatively low level.Besides,five main factors affecting student engagement were as follows: students’ English ability,students’ character traits,peers,teachers’ behavior in class,and the design of role-play.Finally,some suggestions on the efficient application of role-play in English class in junior high school were given based on communicative language teaching,situational cognitive theory and output hypothesis and some corresponding suggestions were also made for relevant research in the future in view of the shortcomings of this study.