초등 영어 교육에 있어서 역할극에 대한 교사의 견해

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to help in the formation of guidelines for the development of role play and in how to make use of it by researching how role play is being used in the field of elementary English and teachers' awareness of role play, as well as surveying and analyzing teachers' evaluation on the effect of role play. As a result, the following conclusions have been made. Firstly, according to the survey results, many teachers have insufficient information for leading role play and have a shortage of teaching materials, thus reducing the effect of role play in English study. In addition, over half of the teachers demonstrated carelessness by skipping over the provided role plays in textbooks, and the instruction did not achieve the intended goal of improving speaking skills due to teachers teaching only from their own knowledge of words and sentences, often by merely changing some parts of a text. Moreover, most teachers are dependent on textbooks or CDs, which causes a lack of practice of some situations in many ways. Post-evaluation and feedback processes were lacking and most cases of carrying out role play showed a lack of proper environmental conditions and teaching aids as guidelines to cultural factors. Secondly, despite many problems in teaching English through role play, most teachers had a positive view of the method. Especially, most teachers were aware that role play was a good method for improving students' confidence in English expressions and speaking skill, as well as creating their interest. Teachers are now more optimistic that role play is useful in education, as results have shown positive effects in linguistic areas such as listening, reading, speaking, and writing after classes. However, writing was an exception, compared to other areas. In this area, there is an awareness that writing can not be managed in role play and is not taught in role plays in most cases, and therefore teachers must develop a technique in teaching to be put to use in teaching writing. Thirdly, the teachers were generally favorable towards teaching English through role play, but experienced great difficulty in actual teaching. Teachers said that English role plays should be positively recommended because students tend to like English role play class, though teaching English role playing was more difficult than general teaching. Furthermore, they thought that the degree of conversation and amount of learning amount per hour in a role play of text was appropriate. However, unlike this assessment, they felt that conducting a role play properly in actual teaching was difficult and tended to take a neutral attitude on skipping over role plays according to conditions. Actually, many teachers were negative to conducting role plays in the national revised curriculum for 5th- and 6th-graders, not introducing role play until last year; therefore, we can infer that they are generally lacking in interest and pay little or no attention to role play for its effectiveness and importance. Except for these, as there was not enough guidance to teach role play in the manual for teachers, teachers had difficulty preparing for role plays. Therefore, they said that more methodical guidelines for a class would be needed. What teachers felt was difficult in teaching role play were the matter of making the students who are not paying attention in class participate in the class and teaching them according to their levels in spite of the excessive number of students and individual variation. In other words, the greatest difficulties were to teach them according to their levels despite the excessive number of students and individual variation. This was followed by the lack of knowledge in teaching methods and related knowledge, teaching hours, and lack of data. For teaching and learning a role play effectively, educational and financial measures for these problems should be prepared for as soon as possible. By this, what I suggest for efficiency in conducting role play in elementary school English is as follows. Firstly, frequent opportunities to learn how to manage a role play program by methodical theories should be prepared sufficiently so that teachers in the field may develop various guidelines for role play through methodical theories and use them by learning them in their spare time. Secondly, for cultivating the skill of real communication, which is a goal of teaching English, the focus should be on improving all skills such as listening, reading, writing and speaking in role plays, which presently focus on speaking, and follow-up research on relevant activities should be continuously carried out. Thirdly, in general, by considering various problems of role play activities, the related measures to reflect on them should be complemented. In addition, in the case of 5th- and 6th-graders, even though learning though role play was not introduced in a textbook as a role play, it can provide students with an opportunity to learn English in a natural and motivating way. Teachers need to voluntarily and positively make efforts in preparing for teaching and learning methods, and teacher motivation and concrete role play guideline training are needed.