Silent Role Play: A Preliminary Activity to Develop Effective Listening and Communication Skills among Advanced Engineering Students.

Abstract

Learning language skills, especially listening and communicating effectively in English as a second language is not an easy task for advanced engineering students, who are generally demotivated to learn English for being from science background and have minimal or no orientation and practice of listening or communication skills in English at their secondary or higher secondary level. Silent Role Play perhaps is an effective and humanistic activity to begin teaching these skills more efficiently at a preliminary stage. A comparative study between Regular Role Play and Silent Role Play was conducted with sixty eight first year engineering students, and it was found that with silent role play, learners are more relaxed, confident and keener to learn effective listening and communication skills even at this advanced stage of their age. The paper focuses on how Silent Role Plays contributes more towards development of effective listening and communication skill with special focus on non-verbal features of language involved in it.