Role Play to Improve ESL Learners’ Communication Skills: A Systematic Review

The used of role play in classroom allows students to act out a situation or adopt the role of someone else in order for them to practice their communication skills. When compared to other language abilities such as reading, and writing, communication skill is said to be the most challenging skill to learn. This study includes a systematic assessment of 20 relevant published studies from Google Scholar, Research Gate, Semantic Scholar, Academia, SAGE, ProQuest and Educational Resources Information Centre (ERIC) database on the use of role play in the classroom to improve ESL students' communication abilities from the year 2011 to 2021. The goal of this study is to see how successful role-playing is at helping ESL learners improve their communication abilities. The results show that role-playing influenced and improved students' speaking abilities, particularly fluency, understanding, context, and interactive ability. Other than this, role play can also assist students gain confidence in their ability to communicate in English and increase their drive to speak English in the classroom. Future research and practise objectives, as well as the limits in regards to prior pertinent studies were more thoroughly evaluated.

English ability is still very lacking, particularly in the communicative sector, we can say that oral skill development exercises in Malaysian schools are still insufficient.

Role Play
Role play, according to the Oxford Dictionary (2015), is "performing in the role of a certain person or character, such as in training or psychotherapy". Role-playing is a wellknown approach for assisting pupils in acclimating to new social situations. Role-playing teaches students how to perform in front of a crowd, which is something they will have to do outside of the classroom (Abdul Rahman and Maarof, 2018). Neupane (2019) stated that a drama-like classroom exercise wherein participants put on certain persona or roles of several individuals in a scene and act out what may happen in that setting can be referred as role play. For example, when students are practising giving instructions in second language, they might need to role play as tourist and a policeman. This provides great opportunity for students to practice the language as one of the effective approaches for having students learn the target language is to have them talk during classroom activities. In his studies, Nga (2011) stated role-playing is an approach in which students act out a part that is so close to actual life that it must be carried out in compliance with the role card. It involves using one's creativeness to imagine and temporarily assume the identity of another person or one's own in a given circumstance, inventing dialogue, and setting up hypothetical situations that takes place in the real world.
As interaction between students are formed through this activity, it is understandable why Kusnierek (2015) defined role play as a "comprehensive set of communication techniques that improves language fluency and encourages student participation in the classroom, while also raising students' motivation and encouraging them to study while also sharing duties between instructor and students". Qing (2011) stated that role plays can last anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, depending on the class's level, specific goals, and prerequisites. Porter-Ladousse (1987, as cited in Kusnierek, 2015 also points out that role-playing can vary in complexity, with some utterances being quite structured and others being very short and simple. As a result, the difficulty of the exercise is determined by the language level of the students.

Advantages of Role-playing
Our students' personal growth benefits greatly from role play. Students' role-playing skills and qualities that has been developed through the implementation of this activity will progress into attributes such as collaboration, creativity, leadership, and risk-taking which are valuable assets in many subjects and sectors of life. Role play engages students' imaginations while providing a secure and supportive setting for them to explore challenges and experiences (Angelianawati, 2019). When students were given a setting to role play in, they worked hard to come up with acceptable words to express their opinions and thoughts in order to communicate. As they prepared for the play, they were able to regain their confidence while simultaneously improving their proficiency in the target language. Learners can use the target language in a non-threatening environment when they participate in roleplays, either because it is a rehearsal of real-life events or because they are not portraying themselves (Saad and Mansor, 2019). Thus, it improves their motivation when using the second language. Observation made by Islam and Islam (2013) while researching the effects of role play on students, they discovered that role-playing was highly motivating because it was different from the monotonous lecture-based activities they were used to. Students were shown to get a distinct experience relating to their lives and other social situations as a result of this activity, which encouraged them to become less inflexible in their behaviour.
According to Razali and Ismail (2017), the benefits of role-playing include the ability to introduce functions, structures, and vocabulary, which can lead to new experiences for students, as well as the ability to strengthen phatic forms of language and provide assistance to many shy students. In a study by Krisdiana et al (2018), as they combined role play activity with word cards, the researchers discovered that it was beneficial in enhancing oral proficiency, grammatical accuracy, articulation, and vocabulary. Meanwhile, Alabsi (2016) in her studies found out that by utilising a role-playing technique in EFL lessons, it is beneficial and more effective than standard vocabulary instruction. The outcome of her studies is in line with prior research indicating that role-playing is an excellent method for improving student vocabulary achievement in particular and learning English language in general (Toumpaniari et al., 2015, Sadeghi & Sharifi, 2013Nair et al., 2014). Due to the fact that students had no prior expertise with the language, students were apprehensive about speaking out loud in front of a large group. According to research done by Yousef, Jamil, and Razak (2013), most Malaysian students lack the confidence to speak due of their own nervousness. Thus, through the implementation of role play, students can practice using the target language in less-stressful environment and they can express themselves freely in a fun and meaningful classroom activity.

Methodology
Utilizing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), this systematic review was carried out. For this evaluation, the PRISMA 2020 statement, which replaces the 2009 statement and has updated reporting guidelines that take into account recent improvements in approaches for finding, choosing, evaluating, and synthesising research, was utilised (Page et al., 2021). In order to conduct this review, the PRISMA 2020, 27-item checklist, which is an enlarged checklist that specifies reporting guidelines for each item, the PRISMA 2020 abstract checklist, and the revised flow diagrams for original and updated reviews was used as a guide throughout the process of completing the systematic review.
The first step, which involved planning the review, was completed in order to determine the necessity for a systematic review regarding this topic and to design a review procedure. Then I moved on to the next step, which was to execute an analysis to find relevant studies that looked into the issue of role play's effectiveness in developing students' communication skills so that relevant studies could be chosen to extract and synthesise the data. After that, the third stage was conducted, which was to report the review by conveying the findings through this systematic review. All of the researches relevant to the chosen topic were primarily sourced via Google Scholar. Then, to find peer-reviewed research studies or articles written in English published between 2011 and 2021, the following international online bibliographic databases were among the databases suggested by Google Scholar and used: Research Gate, Semantic Scholar, Academia, SAGE, ProQuest and Educational Resources Information Centre (ERIC). This review focused solely on studies completed during the previous 10 years.
Effectiveness of role play OR simulation OR drama, effects of role play on communication skills OR speaking skills, benefits of role play OR drama OR simulation in the classroom, and effects on ESL and EFL learners were among the terms and phrases used to search for past related studies in the keywords fields of the above databases. To extend the viewpoint on related researches, relevant keywords such as simulation, drama, and speaking abilities were added in the search. The "sort by relevance" box from the Google Scholar was selected in order to filter and refine the most related researches. 15,900 results were generated from this primary sourcing process. Then, to sort out the best researches that fit into this topic, these criteria were taken into consideration i.
The study's participants or responders might be in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary education. ii.
The research should be undertaken in the context of teaching English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL). iii.
The research should concentrate on the impact of role-playing activities on communication skills.

iv.
As more methodologically rigorous investigations are needed, the studies might use qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method study designs. v.
The role-playing activity must include the use of English language. vi.
The intervention must be conducted in education context.
The introduction and conclusion sections of the entire paper were reviewed in order to select a bigger range of researches. This process is needed mostly due to the fact that it was difficult to rule out journals or articles just on the basis of the studies' titles and abstracts. As a matter of fact, various researches related to medical context was included during the primary sourcing process. After identifying and refining the researches that fits within the topic and filtering out non-related papers, 20 publications were selected.

Results and Discussion
After executing the above-mentioned steps for conducting the systematic review, three review articles and seventeen preceding relevant studies on the impact of role play activity on student communication skills from 2011 to 2021 were shortlisted. Six papers were published in 2019 out of the 20 selected articles, making it the year with the most publications while two articles were published in year 2021, 2018, 2016 and 2013 respectively. The remaining 6 chosen articles were published between 2011 to 2020 where one paper was published for each year (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2020). Table 1 summarises the empirical data supporting the effectiveness of role play exercise in enhancing students' communication abilities.

Effectiveness Of Role Play Activity in Improving Students' Communication Skills
Based on the three review papers and seventeen research papers shortlisted, it can be seen that various positive effects of the implementation of role play activity in classroom towards students' communication skills has been highlighted. Role plays as classroom exercises give platform to students to express themselves freely and communicate whatever in their minds as much as possible. Students tend to be shy when they are asked to speak in the second language alone. However, through the implementation of role play activity in classroom where most of the time are done collaboratively and in a more relaxed environment, students will be more comfortable in expressing themselves without being judge by others. It is expected that more engaging classroom activities will help children speak in English with one another as the participation of students in English-speaking activities necessitates a certain level of excitement on their behalf (Aziz & Kashinathan, 2021). As they are able to practice using the language more freely, the students will gradually improve in regard to their communication skills. They will be able to communicate ideas as they are put in a situation where they are simulating certain real-life situation or role-playing characters in real life. As mentioned in the findings of study by Togimin and Jaafar (2020), role plays as activities in the classroom trained the students to express themselves and as a result, they managed to speak their sentences smoothly without any interruption from fillers or pausing. Role-playing, according to Kusnierek (2015), is an expressive activity that can offer ample experience and practice to ESL students of probable circumstances or events that they may meet in life.
As the nature of role play activity requires collaboration between the students, learners can learn through social constructivism by participating in role play exercises. Learners can improve their social skills through peer contact. According to McLeod (2007), the idea of social constructivism demonstrates that learning takes place through learners' interaction activities. As a result, learners are more likely to replicate positive behaviour due to the fact that learning occur in a non-teaching atmosphere where students learn by experimenting and interacting with their peers. Peer engagement not only allows students to communicate in a less intimidating atmosphere, but it also exposes them to critical social skills. When students become involved and use role-playing techniques like group work and peer work, it's clear that they're part of a community that needs to collaborate and support one another thus, they will be able to collaborate on the same goals (Neupane, 2019). Through role play activity, individual and group duties will be assigned to members of the group, encouraging collaboration and information exchange. This form of group exercise does, in fact, have a significant social advantage in terms of allowing students to improve their interpersonal skills while utilising English. As a result, their capacity to communicate with and comprehend one another will improve significantly, which is the finest foundation for good communicating skills that will eventually facilitates learning.
Role play allows students to test their capacity to participate more actively in the teaching and learning process. Because role play is a student-centred activity, students become more accountable for their own learning because they must participate in the activity in order to get something from it. Students are given the opportunity to lead the activity through role play because they are the ones who must perform. As students have the ability and choice to pick and plan their own characters during the role-playing session, there will be a high degree of interest, which will consequently stimulate motivation. Because the teacher's participation during a role-playing exercise is limited to assisting or observing the students, pupils will feel that they are the centre of attention during the learning process. Due to this, many of the researches shortlisted highlighted that the role-play activity improves the confidence and motivation of the students in learning and also in speaking the target language. Yuliana et al (2014) in their studies stated that role play can help pupils improve their speaking skills as it may aid students in speaking more eloquently. It also inspires students to speak up. Some slow pupils who were afraid to speak out usually in class were even able to speak in their roles meanwhile in the study of Islam and Islam (2012), after four sessions of role-playing practices, the students became more spontaneous and confidence in their ability to communicate as a result of the good engagement and communication. They also increased their verbal fluency, vocabulary utilisation, mood adaptation, body language, and voice expressiveness in various situations. Role plays, according to Qing (2011), help students gain confidence when speaking English. They also provide shy kids the option to take on a different identity. Students that are shy have a hard time participating in talks about themselves or expressing their own thoughts. Adopting a persona from a different culture might be a freeing experience.
Based on the literature, role play provides platform for students to keep practicing their conversational skills where gradually they will improve naturally in regards to their fluency, accuracy, accent and pronunciation of the target language. Speaking is a skill that requires the users to keep using the language in order for them to improve the components of the speaking skill. As seen by the research papers analysed, Bhatti (2021); Togimin and Jaafar (2020); Saad and Mansor (2019); Wulandari et al (2019) improvement in regards to speaking skill has been seen as one of the major effectiveness when implementing role play activity in classroom. Fluency, accuracy, accent and pronunciation cannot be learnt through other skills like reading and writing but it can only be acquired if the learners use the language enough to realise and rectify the mistakes that they have done before. The execution of the role play game enhanced the pupils' accents. It might be because the role playing approach requires pupils to practise speaking and listening more than reading and writing, and they will also need to practise repeating the same phrases or expressions several times in order to understand their dialogue. Apart from remembering each sentence, they were also required to concentrate intentionally on their accent and pronunciation. As a result, pupils may have been more conscious of their accent or pronunciation when speaking (Neupane, 2019). Students feel more comfortable and confident speaking in the target language when they communicate with their group members because they work in smaller groups during role-playing sessions. This extensive engagement was successful in improving their English ability in terms of speaking abilities. This is supported by Oradee (2012) and she also claimed that as pupils have been taught how to use the language functions effectively, they will be able to improve their English proficiency successfully. Students will also get the chance to learn basic interaction skills in English, such as exchanging pleasantries, expressing gratitude and apologies, making requests, obtaining information and services, and much more through role-playing session (Zaidi et al., 2017). To put it another way, as a result of the role-playing activity, the students are getting prepared to be able to communicate vocally in the target language.

Challenges And Suggestions in Implementing Role Play
The major issue with any role-playing activities or simulation is that teachers must accept that there will be some degree of unpredictability and instability when conducting role play activity in classrooms. Students can get out of hand, and they will have to act quickly to restore order in the classroom. This is one of the many reasons why some teachers decided to forego role-playing activity as they do not want to lose their "control" of the classroom thus resorting to more teacher-centred activities. Saad and Mansor (2019) stated in their studies that although the environment in a big classroom during the implementation of role play activity might get chaotic at times, and the students may forget their lines, causing them to feel embarrassed, this problem can ultimately be rectified with the aid of supportive feedback and guidance from the teachers. Teachers need to realise that teaching is not just dependent on the lesson plan and what students can achieve in a day. It should not be limited to strict teaching methods, but it requires the instructors who presents the lesson and employs numerous approaches to make it more engaging and entertaining. Thus, if teachers want to successfully try role play activity in classroom, they must first determine which aspects of the curriculum may be learned more effectively through role-playing session. The teachers should also choose the ideal form of dramatic exercise for the students based on their maturity and readiness.
Aside from this, some students may even seem to be wary of the role-playing exercise. Older children may show lack of excitement and enthusiasm for activities that require them to work in groups or speak up, especially if they have a poor level of proficiency. This will hamper the smoothness of the activity conducted by the teachers thus may discourage them to conduct this kind of activity in the future. Sometime, when the most critical elements during the role-playing session are assigned to hesitant or weak students, they frequently fail. As a result, the role-playing session appear dull and uninteresting, particularly when they perform in front of the entire class for the first time. Therefore, to create more comfortable and productive environment in the classroom, teachers must play a significant role in overcoming these unfortunate scenarios. Alternatively, teachers can consider how they may shorten the role paly activity so that students can test it out and see how it works. This second method is frequently successful, and students may try role-playing activity for a period of time before beginning to enjoy themselves. This coincides with the findings of study by Ampatuan and Jose (2016), where they stated that role play can be a beneficial approach in developing students' communicative competence provided that it is not conducted for too long. When the activity gets dragged, students will start to lose interest and motivation to continue the activity.

Conclusion
Fear of being ridiculed, nervousness, lack of practise, and non-interactive classroom activities may all contributes towards Malaysian ESL students' low competency in their communication skills. As highlighted by Mansor (2015), even though the Communicative Approach has been implemented into the Malaysian education system through the English subject since 1988 where all four skills were being incorporated to fulfil the objective of producing personnel who are compatible with communication knowledge and proficiency, despite this, Malaysians' proficiency in speech and communication is still at best questionable even after more than twenty years of implementation. Reading and writing abilities are frequently emphasised in the classroom, whereas the other two important communication skills like listening and speaking are frequently overlooked. Considering speaking ability is most probably the most essential compared to other skills in terms of enhancing communication among target language learners, it may be one of the reasons why students struggle to communicate proficiently and effectively in English language. Aside from this, less emphasised on providing students with students-centres classroom activity may also hamper the process of acquiring the target language. As students do not receive enough practice and platform to use the target language, naturally they will shy away from using the target language due to its unfamiliarity. To avoid pupils withdrawing and avoiding speaking English, an English teacher's responsibility is to make their lessons lively and student-centred, as well as to provide every student with the chance to practise speaking in English as much as possible (Aziz & Kashinathan, 2021).
Due to this, the implementation of role play activity in classroom give students a breath of fresh air from the normal classroom practices that they have been used to everyday. As it can be considered as a novel experience for them, it will attract their interest and boost the students' motivation to get involved actively with the learning process. As teachers are required to introduce more twenty first century learning elements in classroom, implementation of collaborative and student-centred activity like role play will be more beneficial to the students. Not only will it be able to engage them in a fun and meaningful learning environment, plus it also contributes to various factors that will be able to help improve students' communication skills as highlighted through the findings of all researches shortlisted in this systematic review. Role play facilitate students' learning in developing effective communicating competency in English and practising conversational skills that may be applied in real-life circumstances. Aside from that, via collaborative role-playing sessions, learners' peer interaction will also be strengthened thus allowing them to practise negotiating skills and exchanging ideas with their peers. Role plays can also be used to develop a variety of skills in addition to language and communication. As highlighted by Rahmat et al (2019) when learners are given the chance to acquire new knowledge through exchanges that occurred within the role-playing activity, these elements will effectively scaffold them towards social constructivism.

Limitations and Recommendations for Future Research and Practice
Through all the researches shortlisted in this systematic review, almost all researches believe that role play activity is effective in improving students' communication skills. However, almost half of the researches are conducted with small number of participants. Taking this into consideration, it will be difficult to generalise the experience and insights of the participants in regards to the effectiveness of role play activity in improving their communication skills to the general public. Half of the researches shortlisted were focusing on the experience of the secondary school students while another half is based on the insights of the tertiary level of students. Among 20 papers chosen from this systematic review, only one paper has primary school students as the participants of the study. This has cause limited discussion pertaining perspectives of the use of role play in primary school context. In the future, further study should be conducted to learn more about this matter. Apart from this, due to the limited number of publications shortlisted for this systematic review, less views from various perspective could be offer when talking about how effective is role play implementation towards the goal of improving students' communication skills. Deeper investigation is needed to elaborate the complex elements of communication skills so future research can be conducted to tackle and enrich each component of the communication skills. If more publications are involved in this systematic review, more revelations, views or even different school of thought can be discovered and explored further. Therefore, it is suggested for future studies to get insight from more publications and source with variety of target participants in order to get more comprehensive reviews regarding the effectiveness of role play activity in improving students' communication skills.