Writing and Role Play: A Case for Inclusion

Role play’s relationship to traditional classroom teaching activities is frequently seen as problematic, in much the same way that language learning outside school often has an unexamined relationship with the teaching of school literacy. The small exploratory study described here suggests that planning role play for specific generic purposes and introducing adults as equal players with strong modelling roles, greatly enhances children’s oral and written achievements, and that these can be further developed by introducing an additional teaching intervention. The study’s findings suggest that this kind of role play can be seen as a legitimate way of implementing some parts of the literacy hour, especially in writing, and as a valuable and assessable curriculum activity in its own right.