Enhancing esp learners’ communicative competence through role-playing tasks

This article is intended to investigate the effect of role-playing tasks on the speaking skill ofpre-intermediate ESP learners. For this reason, the popular scientists and researchers examined the students’ speaking ability in two groups: the experimental group and the control group. Twenty-four male and female ESP learners at pre-intermediate level were selected after taking a pretest. Then, they were assigned into two groups in a random manner. In the experimental group, role-playing tasks were utilized for teaching conversation, but the control group was shown to the conventional method of teaching speaking. After several sessions of treatment, a post-test was conducted in order to check the students’ speaking capability. Concerning the data analysis, two independent and paired sample t-tests were used to analyze the data, collected using three testing instruments: Longman Placement Test (2004); the semi-structured interviews; and SPSS software version 20. Based on the inferential statistics, the participants in the experimental group illustrated an importantly better performance in the post-test. It was finished that the treatment provided for the experimental group had a positive effect on the learners’ speaking ability. In addition, the participants’ attitudes to role-playing tasks and their roles in language learning were positive. It is expected that ESP teachers and course book writers, syllabus designers, and material producers will get advantage from the findings of this article.