ROLE PLAY IN BUILDING THE COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS IN STUDENTS FROM ATECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

Abstract

The article presents a brief history of role play from Moreno’s work to the present time and the specificity of role play as a teaching method. The conceptual differences among similar interactive methods are identified: group work, thinking hats, the mosaic method. The didactic method of role play is applied to a group of 90 first-year students from a technical faculty, taking the subject of Communication Techniques, for 12 weeks. The research aims to develop professional communication skills by using role play. We identified the communication problem of the students from a technical faculty, set research objectives, present the research design, the results and their interpretation. The communication problem of the first-year students from a technical faculty consists in the difficulty of dealing with active listening, empathy, negotiation with others. As a result, the research objectives focused on the development of these subcomponents of the communication competences. The criteria for assessing the application of this method for the development of professional communication competences are established by the teacher. Through the SWOT method applied at the end of the 12-weeks research, students highlighted the positive aspects, the negative ones, the opportunities and the risks of implementing role play. The conclusions of the paper emphasize the need to use interactive methods with the aim of developing students’ transversal competences, but also the limitations or inadequacies of these methods.