What’s more, the Oxford English textbook of junior high school contains a great deal of materials suitable for role-play in every unit, such as comic strip, dialogues and topics. In addition, although the junior high school students are weak in grammar and vocabulary, they are active in thinking, good at imitating and keen on self-expressing. They like new and vivid things. Role-play is coinciding with the characteristics of the students because it creates specific real language situation to make English class vivid and full of interest and joy, to arouse learning interest of the students, and finally to instruct them to associate the language with lively situation. Therefore, in recent years, role-play has been widely used in English teaching and favored by many teachers and students. 

However, in the process of applying role-play to English classroom teaching in junior high school, there have been many problems. Based on making a deep exploration on the problems of role-play in junior high school, this paper aims to discuss how to design a proper and effective role-play activity and implement it successfully, making it adapt to English classroom teaching in junior high school.

2. Literature Review

Role-play has gained great popularity and drawn much attention from the researchers and teachers homes and abroad for a long time. Different researchers have carried out studies on the application of role-play in English teaching from different angles.

In China, Li Xiaoyan, in her paper The Applied Study of Role-play in Classroom Teaching of English in China, stated the definition and classification of role-play, and the procedures of implementing role-play in English classes (Li Xiaoyan, 2012: 18). Wang Yin concluded some problems in the process of applying role-play to real English class in junior high school through long-term research (Wang Yin, 2013: 32).  

Other researchers, such as Cai Min, Li Xuemei, Ma Xiaofang and Wu Haiying, also did researches on the application of role-play in English classroom teaching.

What’s more, there are many researchers abroad who have been showing great interest in studying role-play.

Livingstone has elaborated three major advantages of role-play in English teaching classroom: (1) (Role-play can) maximize student activity; (2) (Role-play can) prevent discipline problems by ensuring that classroom material is relevant and interesting; (3) (Role-play can) be accessible to students of different ability levels (Livingstone, 1983: 25). Brown illustrated the conduction of role-play in English class. He argued that role-play involves “giving a role to one or more members of a group and assigning an objective or purpose that participants must accomplish” (Brown, 2002: 183). 

In fact, compared with the studies on the theories of role-play, the studies of role-play in real practice are comparatively few. In this paper, based on making a deep exploration on the problems of role-play in real practice, this author aims to discuss how to design a proper and effective role-play activity suitable for students in junior high school and implement it successfully in real English classroom teaching.

3. Role-play in English Classes 源/自:吹冰:`论~文'网www.chuibin.com

3.1 Theoretical Foundation of Role-play in English Classes

Role-play is generally characterized as a classroom activity to approximate “real life” experiences in certain settings. The studies on its theory and practice show that Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is the direct theoretical foundation of role-play.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach used in foreign or second language teaching, and emphasizes communicative competence as the objective of language learning. That is, CLT aims to cultivate the learners’ communicative capability or communicative skill. And it is agreed that the learners’ communicative competence is acquired through a series of communicative activities. According to Harmer, communicative activities mean “getting students to actually do things in language, and it is the ‘doing’ that should form the main focus of such sessions” (Harmer, 2001: 151). In another word, communicative activities are activities that motivate students to use the language they are learning in the real world.