Role Play- An Effective Approach to Developing Overall Communicative Competence

Abstract

Increasing cross-cultural contact has highlighted the necessity for enhanced effective cross-cultural communication, and it becomes the most important task for an English teacher to help students develop communicative competence. As a type of communicative activity, role play is a very valuable method to help learners to interact and provide them an opportunity to practice in the target language context. This paper addresses the issue of role play in the college audio-visual class, its purpose is to suggest that the application of role plays could increase students’ intercultural awareness and help them develop overall communicative competence.
Key words: Role play; Communicative competence; Cultural awareness