Use of Role Plays in Developing Speaking Skills of Undergraduate Students: An Experiment

Teaching English in India successfully is still a burning issue. After learning English for more than ten years or so, the under graduating populace cannot communicate in English either in the classroom or in real-life contexts. Therefore, students' proficiency in English has been the constant thought of teachers, teacher trainers, ELT experts, and linguists over all these years. We, as teachers, are always conscious of how we can make our students learn English, how they would become fluent in English. We do some experiments with pedagogical devices in the classroom. This paper is an attempt to find out how do role plays help in developing speaking skills. This paper is also an attempt to find out whether role plays help in developing students' communicative competence. Keywords: ELT classroom, speaking skills, role play, communicative competence, language skills, communicative approach, techniques to develop speaking skills, Intervention, and observations.