Role-Play-Based Assessment as an Alternative Assessment to Evaluate English for Occupational Purposes Students’ Language Use: A Pragmatic Approach

The interactive nature of language teaching trends to authentic and communicative ways of practicing and assessing students’ language skills, particularly, in English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) class. Alternative assessment (AA) like role-play based assessment (RPBA) is a dynamic trend toward either authentic or communicative way of teaching and learning skills. RPBA activates the students’ long-term memory and multimemory units. Today, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has become the essential components of English courses to prepare students for applying language in educational and occupational settings. This is a case study which aims at proposing RPBA as AA to assess EOP students language use knowledge. To this end, 12 MA Marketing students were selected to participate in this research. The collected data were based on an attitude questionnaire and the students’ role-playing assessment scores during the research treatment period. The results obtained from the students’ scores proved that role-playing had significant effects on the EOP students’ language use knowledge. Also, the results of the questionnaire revealed that EOP students had similar views toward the characteristics of RPBA to evaluate the students’ language use. Therefore, in EOP course, RPBA as AA could be considered as a pragmatic approach toward dynamic language learning and teaching which is based on the students’ language needs and goals. It allows the teachers to evaluate their students’ pragmatic knowledge.