The literature on role-playing as a classroom instructional technique for English as a second language has addressed its benefits in improved acquisition of language or linguistic skills, communicative skills, cross-cultural skills, and interpersonal skills. However, promoters of role-playing may have set their goals too high and may be wasting class time that could be devoted to more academic and vocational communicative objectives. Conversational routines are easy to manipulate but very difficult to instill in students. While traditional teaching methods reward the "memorizers" (introverts), and methods based on the goal of communicative competence reward the "actors" (extroverts), psycholinguists have not yet proven one learning style to be inherently superior to another. Role playing may be less effective in actual practice than it seems in theory. (MSE)