In EFL contexts, role-playing has emerged not merely as a classroom game, but as a pedagogical strategy that transforms speaking instruction by bridging the gap between communication apprehension and meaningful language practice. This study aims to investigate junior high school students' perceptions of role-playing activities in English class. Specifically, it examines three interconnected dimensions of students' perceptions: (1) their evaluation of the activity's effectiveness in improving speaking skills, (2) the benefits they experience during participation, and (3) the challenges they encounter throughout the process. These three aspects together provide a comprehensive understanding of how students perceive role-playing as a learning activity. Employing a qualitative case study design, the research involved 30 eighth-grade students at a public junior high school in Sukoharjo, Central Java. Data were collected through questionnaires serving as a purposive sampling tool, semi-structured interviews with six selected students representing positive, neutral, and negative perceptions, and non-participatory classroom observations. The collected data were subsequently analyzed using Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña's interactive model of qualitative analysis, which involves data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing. The findings reveal that role-playing transforms students' speaking experiences by creating a psychologically safe environment where fictional roles reduce anxiety and increase willingness to communicate spontaneously. Students reported linguistic benefits including improved fluency, vocabulary retention, and enhanced pronunciation awareness. Affective benefits emerged as well, with students experiencing greater confidence, reduced speaking anxiety, and increased motivation to participate in class activities. Social benefits were also evident, as role-playing fostered collaborative learning, peer support, and real-time communicative interaction. However, several challenges were identified, including fear of negative peer evaluation, difficulties with vocabulary retrieval, struggles with spontaneous sentence construction, and environmental constraints such as classroom noise and limited preparation time. The study concludes that while role-playing holds meaningful pedagogical value for EFL speaking instruction, its effectiveness depends on adequate teacher scaffolding, supportive classroom environments, and careful attention to individual differences in emotional readiness and confidence levels. These findings contribute to understanding how communicative activities can be optimized in Indonesian EFL classrooms, particularly in addressing affective barriers to speaking development. This study is limited to a single junior high school context with a small interview sample, suggesting that findings may not be universally generalizable without further extensive research.