The department of roman-german philology theme: importance of using role playing in teaching course work done by

Participants are given particular roles to play in a 
conversation or other interaction, such as an email exchange, typical of 
their discipline. They may be given specific instructions on how to act or 
what to say, as an aggressive client or patient in denial, for example, or 
required to act and react in their own way depending on the 
requirements of the exercise. The participants will then act out the 
scenario and afterwards there will be reflection and discussion about the 
interactions, such as alternative ways of dealing with the situation. The 
scenario can then be acted out again with changes based on the outcome 
of the reflection and discussion. Possible Technologies to Support the 
Approach. Role-play is a very flexible teaching approach because it 
requires no special tools, technology or environments, for example 
student could work through a role-play exercise just as effectively in a 
lecture hall as in a seminar room. However, technology can provide 
significant advantages, and even new possibilities, for using the 
approach as a learning activity. At the most simple level, technology 

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such as voice recorders, video cameras and smartphones/tablets allow 
traditional face-to-face role-play exercises to be recorded and stored 
online for later reference, analysis and reflection, as in this example of 
negotiation skills from EduCon, Korea. This can allow an exercise to be 
revisited at a later date and re-evaluated based on subsequent learning 
and experience, which isn’t generally possible when the exercise has not 
been recorded. Other tools that can be used with this traditional style of 
role-play are an electronic voting system or Twitter, both of which 
would allow a group of students to observe the role-play and evaluate 
the situation and conversation as it develops, such as by voting on 
whether a character was too aggressive or submissiveduring a particular 
interaction. This information could be retained and, coupled with a 
recording, provide another resource for later analysis and reflection. 
However, technology can be used to create role-play exercises beyond 
what is possible in a face-to-face session. Asynchronous technologies, 
such as online forums and discussion boards, Social Networks, Twitter, 
etc., allow role-play to take place over longer periods of time and in a 
more considered way. This means that role-play can take place outside 
of timetabled sessions and in situations where students are unable to 
physical meet at the same time. In this situation students would post 
their part of the conversation, wait until the other participant(s) have 
responded, and then post their own reply, and so on. This method allows