Role-Play-Based Assessment as an Alternative Assessment to Evaluate English for Occupational Purposes Students’ Language Use: A Pragmatic Approach

The interactive nature of language teaching skills trends to authentic and communicative tools of practicing and assessing students’ language skills, particularly, in English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) class. Alternative assessment (AA) like role-play based assessment (RPBA) is a dynamic trend toward either authentic or communicative way of teaching, learning and evaluating students cognitively. Today, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has become the essential components of English courses to prepare students to use language in educational and occupational settings. This is a case study and proposes RPBA as AA to assess EOP students communicative knowledge. To this end, 12 MA Marketing students were selected to participate in this research. The data were collected through assessing the students’ role-playing tasks in the classroom along with a RPBA attitude questionnaire. The results obtained from the students’ scores proved that role-playing had significant effects on the EOP students’ language use knowledge. Also, the results of the questionnaire revealed that EOP students had similar views toward the characteristics of RPBA to evaluate EOP students. Therefore, in EOP course, RPBA as AA could be considered as a humanizing approach to dynamic language learning and teaching which is based on students’ needs and goals, and allows EOP teachers to evaluate their students pragmatically.

Keywords:

alternative assessment , pragmatic competence , role-playing-based assessment , traditional assessment ,