Role Play in Literacy and Customer Care classes


Eabhan Ní Shuileabháin Eabhan has worked for Grwp Llandrillo Menai (an FE colleges group in North Wales) for four years, teaching literacy and digital literacy in Caernarfon, Bangor and Llangefni. This is her third career switch, aer working in restaurants and hotels in Ireland and America, and as an editor in an American publishing company. She also writes poetry and is widely published in poetry journals and magazines in Europe and America.


I teach literacy and customer care skills in a range of short courses designed to support the essenal skills people need to find employment. These courses target learners who are receiving Jobseeker’s Benefit and who are ‘acvely looking for work’. Students range in age from 18 to 60. They have a wide range of employment experience, including never having been employed. They have diverse levels of educaon, and have oen had negave experiences in their previous schooling.


The main reason I started to use role play is because I found students did not have any praccal understanding of the variety of customer behaviour they might have to face, since many of them had either never worked before or had worked in areas that did not deal with the public directly. They were oen unable to appreciate how difficult it can be to deal effecvely with customer problems, especially when the customer is agitated. However, I found that when students used role plays to explore the types of behaviours that customers display, they understood the problems in resolving customer care issues in a far more visceral way. Role playing customer care scenarios not only ground their learning in the real world of employment but also enable me to take literacy out of a limited textbook environment into its praccal use in the workplace.


However, as Marilyn Nathan warns (1997), to manage role plays, “You need a good deal of confidence, because it means relinquishing some of your control over the ... [learners] once they leave their seats” (p. 58). It is much more difficult to control a class broken into several smaller groups, all of whom are occupied at different stages of the acvity. The very nature of group work means that the class becomes louder and the tutor must allow free movement and discussion. I found that a certain level of fun and exuberance must be encouraged if role plays are to succeed and tutors must be prepared to relinquish some control to ensure the exercise becomes an enjoyable one.


Role play is also parcularly useful for developing the interpersonal skills of learners, giving them the opportunity to pracse skills in a risk-­‐free environment. This has certainly been the case in my classes, with learners’ overall confidence, self-­‐esteem and interpersonal skills improving as a result of their parcipaon.


Because the role plays we undertake focus on the customer care sector, students see in a very clear manner, even before any formal evaluaon takes place, how customer care situaons are affected by customer service agents’ atudes, tones and styles of language use (an excellent underpinning for speaking and listening qualificaons). We always conclude role plays with feedback and evaluaon sessions, whose aim is to facilitate self-­‐ and peer-­‐ reflecon. These phases are extremely important because they enable me to subtly direct the evaluaon so that each student contributes to the discussion and so that all relevant points are covered. I ask learners to fill in a review sheet on each role play because they are usually reluctant to comment verbally, believing that the students they are commenng on will think they are being crical or judgemental. However, when given an appropriate handout, students are much more likely to fill in responses to specific quesons, such as “What could have been improved in the scenario?”


I use three different strategies: unscripted role plays, where students develop their own scenarios; scripted role plays, where students are given a dialogue, which they perform in a number of different ways (e.g. illustrang the importance of body language); and simulated dialogues, where students write their own dialogue but can simply read it aloud sing at the desk rather than geng up to perform it.


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