Cooperative Role-plays to Support Self-confidence when “Public Speaking Anxiety” is experienced

Abstract

This qualitative research was conducted to support self-confidence of A1 students when they experienced public speaking anxiety, through the use of cooperative role-plays. This study explored not only the factors directly related to the teaching of a language, but also the emotional factors or feelings that students showed and expressed when they had to assume a role, work cooperatively and act in front of their peers. Furthermore, by solving this problem the students of English 1 class could be benefited, for example, in the social factor since it would help the students to communicate in a correct way with others as in a daily conversation on different topics, likewise for specific purposes such as getting a job or traveling to other countries. The participants that were chosen for this project were 30 students, 9 men and 21 women, from different majors. The instruments used to carry out this study consisted of a semi-structured interview for the teacher of the course, a pre-test and a post-test which includes questions about the feelings, perceptions and relationships of the participants with themselves and with others in order to know about the students’ self-confidence, field notes to collect information about the behaviors of the students during the process when applying the cooperative role-plays, and finally, a focus group to know the students’ points of view about the process. At the end of the implementation, it is demonstrated from the data analysis that the cooperative role-plays had an effect on self-confidence when the participants had to speak English in public.