Let me tell you about my (first) year of disasters in South Korea.
There was the time I insisted on buying a fish at the grocery store despite three increasingly frantic workers trying to stop me. I thought they were being weird about foreigners buying fish. Turned out the fish was deadly poisonous if you didn’t know how to prepare it correctly. Thankfully someone saw it in my fridge before I tried to cook it.
Then there was the night I got locked inside a bank ATM vestibule at 10 pm because I didn’t know it locked up after hours. I stood there in the dark, banging on the glass, trying to figure out how to explain “I’m trapped” but I didn’t know the word for trapped” in Korean.
And the restaurant incident. During my lunch break from school, I confidently ordered what I thought was a nice soup. The elderly couple running the restaurant was aghast and tried to talk me out of it (I thought), but finally served it to me. My boss got a phone call that day. And that’s when I found out I’d had hangover soup just before teaching children’s classes.
But the hair salon? The hair salon was the worst.
I sat in that chair thinking I had used my fingers to show how much I wanted trimmed off. Just a little bit, you know? Maybe half an inch.
They thought I was showing them how much hair should be LEFT on my head.
By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. My already nuclear orange hair (long story involving Korean dye and foreigner hair chemistry) was now also drastically shorter than I’d had since elementary school. Two of my first-grade students cried when they saw me the next day. They called me Ugly Teacher. I wanted to cry too.
Years later, when I started teaching adult ESL in Oklahoma, I couldn’t stop thinking about those (and many, many more) disasters because my students were living their own RIGHT THEN. Different country, yeah, but that same feeling of going in blind because you don’t know what to say or how to say it, and you really don’t know what the consequences might be.
So I started creating role plays. Not fairy tale theater. Not “practice ordering at a restaurant” with vocabulary they’d never really use. Real stuff. The situations that kept my students up at night.
What do role plays teach adult ESL students?
Role plays let students practice the English they need for the life they’re trying to build here. Getting an apartment. Going to the dentist. Handling a problem at their kid’s school. Shopping for something specific. These aren’t just language exercises, they’re rehearsals for real life.
When you create role plays around themes your students deal with, you can pack in the vocabulary they’ll need, the idioms native speakers use, and the cultural expectations they might not know about yet. You can give them scenario cards that mirror what they’ll face, scripts they can practice, and even some discussion questions that help them think through “what if” situations before they happen.
Your classroom becomes their safe place to screw up before the stakes are high and they’ve got nuclear orange hair or a poisonous fish in the fridge.
So how do you come up with ideas for role plays?
This part takes time and thought. But if you know where to look, the ideas are already there.
1. Listen to your students
I mean really listen. When they’re chatting before class starts, what are they stressed about? What stories do they tell about their week? What went wrong, what confused them, what made them feel helpless?
Those conversations will hand you role play topics on a silver platter.
Think about what YOU would need to do if you moved to a new city tomorrow. Set up utilities, right? Find a doctor (ugh). Navigate parent-teacher conferences. Register your dog. Our everyday tasks are their everyday tasks, except they’re doing them in a language that still feels slippery and uncertain.
2. Mine your own disasters
If you’ve ever lived outside your home country, you’ve got a goldmine of role play ideas sitting in your memory. What was hard? What did you wish someone had prepared you for? What vocabulary would have saved you from that mortifying moment?
I learned after the hair incident that I needed to know how to say “just trim the ends” and “stop, that’s too much!” Would a role play have prevented my students from nicknaming me Ugly Teacher? Maybe. Probably.
What do you wish you’d practiced saying before you tried to do it for real? That’s your role play.
3. Ask the people your students need to talk to
Go into your community and ASK. Find a pharmacist during a slow Tuesday afternoon and ask what communication problems they run into with English learners. Talk to the apartment complex manager near your school. Chat with the receptionist at a local clinic.
The people your students interact with every day can tell you exactly what language breakdowns happen most often. Then you build role plays around those specific situations. Pick locations near your school because your students are more likely to go there.
Suddenly you’re not guessing what they need. You KNOW.
What should you include in your role plays?
Once you know your theme, start making the support.
Give them the vocabulary they’ll need, but don’t stop there. Throw in expressions native speakers actually use. “Can you fill this prescription?” sounds different than “I need to pick up my meds.” Both work, but one sounds more natural.
Create scenario cards with just enough detail to guide them without scripting every word. “You’re at the pharmacy. Your insurance was rejected. You need this medication today.” Let THEM figure out how to say it. (Or if they need more help, give them scripts!)
Consider including some matching exercises where students have to connect questions with appropriate responses. It’s sneaky vocabulary practice that doesn’t feel like it.
And derailment scenarios. Before they perform, make them think through “what if” scenarios. What if the pharmacist says they can’t help you? What if you don’t understand their answer? Role plays fall apart when students haven’t thought past the happy path.
When they’re standing at an actual pharmacy counter a week later, they’ll remember. Not because they memorized a list of relevant vocabulary words, but because they already lived through this moment in your classroom.
The Bottom Line
Our students don’t want to depend on others to translate for them forever. They want independence. They want to handle their own business, fight their own battles, and advocate for themselves.
Role plays give them that. Theme by theme, situation by situation, you’re handing them the tools they need to navigate life here without someone holding their hand.
Before you know it, you’ll have a collection of role plays that genuinely matter to your students’ real lives because you listened to what they’re struggling with and gave them a chance to practice before the stakes were real.
Okay, now, if you want a small taste of one of my role plays, you can get a free sample of one about dealing with neighbors (because that applies to literally every adult student). Just subscribe below and it’s yours.
And if you want themed role play units that are print and go ready, click here. I’ve got a ton in my TpT store.
That’s it from me. See you in the next post!
Oh, wait…one more thing. You might want to read The Amazing Power of Role Plays in Adult ESL
