Abstract:
Teaching grammar has always been a problematic area of language teaching. While teachers spend a great deal of time and energy to teach, the students are not eager to learn as they find it a real chore. This study compared two kinds of activities for teaching grammar: games and traditional exercises. It sought to discover the effect of games on the students’ grammatical accuracy. For this purpose, 61 students of Nikshahr High School for Gifted Students were chosen to participate in the study. They were assigned to two groups: control and experimental. Prior to the study, all the subjects were given the Nelson Proficiency Test to ensure they were homogenous in terms of language proficiency. Then, the experimental group was set to use grammar games in the practice phase of their classes, while the control group practiced through traditional repetition, fill in the blanks, or multiple-choice exercises. Following that, to measure the effect of the treatment, the subjects were post-tested for grammatical accuracy. Then a series of paired- and independent-samples t-tests were conducted to evaluate the hypothesis of the study. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between the two groups although the experimental group had a small advantage over the control group.
Machine summary:
The Effects of Game-based Learning on the Grammatical Accuracy of Iranian High school Students 1Nahid YarahmadzehiID: IJEAP-1802-1180 2Mostafa Parvin Abstract Received: 01/03/2017 Accepted: 04/12/2017 Available online: 02/02/2018 Teaching grammar has always been a problematic area of language teaching.
One of the suggested ways to make learning a language in general and grammar in particular more fun, fascinating, and motivating is using games in order to lead students to participate in class activities, and hence have a chance to practice or use the new language items they have just learnt eagerly and willingly instead of being forced to do the tasks unwillingly.
Regarding the interactive nature of game-based language teaching, it seems that it is necessary to conduct a study in Iran's English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context where traditional way of teaching grammar is dominant to find whether or not such instruction is adaptable to its system of language education especially in a bilingual community such as Baluchistan.
Therefore, this study in particular seeks to investigate whether or not games have any significant effect on the grammatical accuracy level of Iranian senior high-school students.
Animal Habits Materials: None Grammar Focus: use of present simple to describe habitual actions; composition of simple sentences; Procedure: For this activity, students worked in pairs or small groups to prepare a description of an animal of their choice.
3. Post- test results This study investigated whether subjects’ playing games instead of traditional practices had improved students level of accuracy in respective grammatical structures and, if yes, was this improvement statistically significant or not.