TY - JOUR AU - Shapiro, Shawna AU - Leopold, Lisa PY - 2012/08/23 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - A Critical Role for Role-Playing Pedagogy JF - TESL Canada Journal JA - TESL Canada VL - 29 IS - 2 SE - Perspectives DO - 10.18806/tesl.v29i2.1104 UR - https://teslcanadajournal.ca/index.php/tesl/article/view/1104 SP - 120 AB - This article draws from practitioners’ experience and from scholarship in a variety of disciplines to construct a rationale for incorporating what we call “critical roleplay” in the English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) classroom. We discuss the historical significance of role-play in TESOL and explore why this type of pedagogy has become less prominent in scholarship from recent decades. We argue for a new direction in role-play pedagogy that foregrounds critical thinking as essential to academic literacy. We describe several role-play activities that were successfully implemented in college-level EAP classes to demonstrate that academic role-play can be both cognitively challenging and linguistically relevant. ER -