عليرضا عابدی زاده

ABSTRACT

The aims of the study are to know how much of an impact do visual, aural and kinesthetic games have on students’ achievement at Darab junior High School in Sari, Iran. John Heron and Peter Reason's Cooperative Inquiry was implemented to get the participants more involved and find the shortcomings of the book that needed to be remedied the most. The procedures used were planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. It was done in two cycles throughout eight sessions. We used collaborative action research with some other English teachers.

In collecting the data, the instruments were interview, observation, questionnaire and test, the test being only given to students and the rest of the instruments administered to both teachers and students. The result of the study showed the mean score’s pretest reached about 69 and posttest’s score reached up to 74.52. It is important to describe that there is a significant improvement of at least 9% in every participant of this research.

Therefore, the criteria of success had been determined. It is crucial to note that games have contributed a positive impact on teaching and learning process. This also implies that they enhanced students’ enthusiasm and motivation. Clearly, they improved our students’ active participation, confidence and their capabilities in their language skills. In short, it can be stated that game-based teaching creates good, enjoyable circumstances and reduces the boredom and stress of learning process.

Keywords: action research, game-based, visual, aural, kinesthetic, learning

CONTENTS

Abstract 1

Contents 2

Introduction 3

Planning 4

Literature Review 4

Methodology and Work Plan 7

The Context 10

SARI, IRAN 10

Action & Observation 11

Data Collection 11

Data Analysis 13

The Findings 16

Appendices 17

References 18

INTRODUCTION

Children learn through exploration and play much more easily and efficiently rather than the conventional method during their early years of development. Opportunities to learn in this manner drastically change as children mature.

“Experiences that allow children to explore and play to learn will develop creative and critical thinking which is essential to their academic success” (Davies et al., 2013; Holmes, Li den, & Shin, 2013; International Association for Development of the Information Society, 2012; Won & Han, 2010).

As technology advances and new equipment are introduced to the educators, different opportunities for creating unique learning experiences such as games arise that can be built in their lesson plan. To do so, educators need to analyze previous researches concerning the implementation and effectiveness of game-based teaching. The purpose of this literature review is to explore the use of game-based teaching in a junior high school classroom to determine its effect on students’ academic achievement.

PLANNING

LITERATURE REVIEW

No matter how different kids are old or young, girl or boy, athletic or not; they all tend to like playing games and group activities. Not only does it affect how much they participate, but also games have shown to have great deal of influence in their learning process.

Recent reviews have paid well-deserved attention to exploring different ways to turning students into active participants in the lesson instead of being passive learners. The more students do to understand something on their own, the less they will need further explaining and when students figure something out by themselves, they feel a lot happier and more confident to keep on rather than being obligated to practice. Therefore, for students to actually want to be a part of the class, we need to find something they are familiar with such as games and turn it into an educational material.

“Game-Based Learning works because of the engagement that comes from putting the learning into a game context” (Prensky, 2001, p.147). Users get to experience theory and explore new ideas in a new environment. Learning does not only have to occur in an educational setting. People gather information consciously or subconsciously while interacting with a media source such as computers, video games, or even television programs.

Games also attract many users with different learning styles and intelligences. “Each learner’s intelligence profile consists of a combination of relative strengths and weaknesses among the different intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and (at least provisionally) existential” (Gardner, 2006) (Koran, S., Kornhaber, M., Gardner, H., 2006, p. 23). Most games are designed with visual and auditory skills in mind” (Gee, 2007, p.24). The visual and audio interface provides a robust source of information to which the human brain quickly interprets and responds. Other intelligences are also present in some games. The versatility of game development and available resources provide game users with a variety of multiple intelligence experiences.

The reason most people want to learn a language is to be able to use it in real situations, for example when travelling. Games can be a very good way to practice these skills because they can easily be used to reenact various situations from real life and provide students with practice in their fluency. In addition, by using games in the classroom, the teacher is giving his students a bigger role, and he himself is stepping out of the frontline, which is a positive thing because it allows students to take on more responsibility. Furthermore, it allows students to do more on their own, and that can very well result in an increase in their confidence level. (Langran & Purcell.1994. p.12-14).

Games are good for shy students and students with low confidence, and that applies specifically when playing takes place in smaller groups because then they get a chance to speak in front of fewer audience instead of having to express themselves in front of the whole class. Besides, it is sometimes easier to open up and forget the shyness when playing a game because the atmosphere is not as serious and more emphasis is put on fluency rather than grammatical correctness. (Langran & Purcell.1994. p.12-14).

Using games in the classroom is important because many children do not get enough opportunity to play during their free time, which can be traced back to the rapid changes in our society. Cities are getting bigger and traffic is getting heavier which means that more and more parents are hesitant to let their children play outside. Also passive activities such as watching television or the computer screen are seen as being more exciting than actually physically playing, so today the sight of children playing various games in groups outside is becoming much more rare than it was 10, 15 or 20 years ago. This is not a good development, and it can have several bad consequences for our society. One possible consequence is that the lack of movement can cause health problems because even though not all games are physical some certainly are (Masheder.1989.p. 3). Another consequence this change might have is decreased social skills because, according to Piaget, children’s games reflect society and that by playing games children learn many of society’s rules and regulations (Cole, Cole & Lightfoot. 2005.p. 536).

Games have always had a way of communicating with kids that can never be replaced. Aydan Ersöz (2000) states that: “well-chosen games are invaluable as they give students a break and help them practice language skills. Games are highly motivating since they are amusing and challenging at the same time. Furthermore, they employ meaningful and useful language in real contexts. They also encourage and increase cooperation”.

METHODOLOGY AND WORK PLAN

A classroom action research (CAR) was used in this study for the first method. “The primary reason for engaging in action research is to assist the “actor” in improving and/or refining his or her actions” (Sagor, 2000). The participants of the study were the English teacher and 38 students from the seventh grade of Darab Junior High School of Sari, Iran.

It was aimed to reveal students’ difficulties in learning vocabulary, especially with visual games as it was stated by Kurt. L, CAR that “type of classroom research carried out by the teacher in order to solve problems or find answers toward context-specific issues (Tampubolon, 2009).

Based on these considerations, in this study, we used collaborative action research in which we cooperated with one of the English teachers of Darab Junior High School in Sari. The teacher acted as an observer while we acted as teachers who taught by using 3 games. The teacher was as an active participant who was not only functioning as an observer but also taking actions by making lesson plan and giving assessment. Then, he helped us collect and analyze the data.

The first game was created to help students through visual simulation to introduce and practice new words facilitating the learning process of students who are more inclined to learn with visual material.

Step 1: Introducig words with pictures

Step 2: Arranging the word that represents the picture

Step 3: Recognizing the word for each picture

The Second game was designed for the purpose of helping students that learn better by doing things meaning the more efficient way of teaching them is through kinesthetic activities.

Step 1: Based on action commands given (sit down and stand up), they should play and when they make a mistake they’re out of the game

Step 2: the remaining have to choose out of a group of actions (mostly verbs) to display and their partners should guess (like a game of Charades or guessing games)

Step 3: Once they guess right, their partner has to display another one and everyone has to guess the answer

The third game was for students who prefer learning through sounds and music (aural), trying to better engage them and increase their achievement in the test afterwards.

Step 1: Listen to the audio without the transcript

Step 2: Transcripts are provided and students are asked to listen to the audio and fill as many gaps as they can

Step 3: Choose a sport and their partner has to name as many words related as they can

Step 4: Students write as many of the words they heard from their partners

The audio is attached here

After implementing the classroom action research in the seventh grade students of Junior High School, we conducted two test (pre-test and post-test). To compare the test result between pretest and the tests of each cycle, we used some steps. Those are calculating the students mean score of the test, calculating the class percentage, and calculating the students’ improvement score from pre-test to post-test into percentage. The interview towards the English teacher was also carried out to know his response about implementation of the action. At last, questionnaire was administrated to know the students’ responses towards the implementation of aforementioned games.

Questionare 1

THE CONTEXT

DARAB JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

SARI, IRAN

Firstly, we faced many complications trying to develop educational games for a group of different individuals since we needed to make sure that the games were relevant to the subject or that if they fit our students’ age. We also kept in mind to select games that were not too complicated because they could potentially result in students’ loss of interest, or even defeat.

Secondly, the fact that most of their families had financial issues made our job a lot harder since they were not familiar with what we were trying to do. Moreover, the lack of audiovisual equipment limited our resources to a great extent.

Thirdly, classroom interaction is one of the main factors that can facilitate the students’ language development and different methods have been put into practice to enhance students’ engagement. However, establishing a relationship with our students in order to get them to interact more often in the activities despite their previous background in school took a lot of time.

But fortunately enough, using games to teach interested them in the subject immensely; which in turn attracted them to do even more outside the confines of the classroom.

ACTION & OBSERVATION

DATA COLLECTION

In order to evaluate the intended material for modification into games in terms of being motivating or effective enough, we developed different questioners for students and teachers. Then we collected more information about what they felt was absent in their books with interviewing the students. After gathering additional information from some of the more experienced teachers about what they thought was left off from the material or their students needed more, we organized the information in four main categories.

First and foremost, as stated in (Larson & Marsh, 2005, loc. 1888) "What tend to go unrecognized are the existing practices students bring to school that are multimodal and highly sophisticated technologically" digital media and games play a big part in our students’ lives nowadays. Therefore, games or presentations developed for the content could become an essential part of our class. Unfortunately, the circumstances in our school, which was an ordinary state-run school, were obviously less than ideal since our use of games was restricted by the resources that we had at our disposal there. However, the majority of schools in Iran are working in the absence of such audiovisual equipment. Nevertheless, we worked on different solution and possible ways of using the resources we had to our students’ advantage.

Secondly, students tend to respond to visual material more excellently as Margaret Walsh explains in (Walsh, 20 10, p. 24-25) "Instances of youths' out-of-school digital literacy proficiencies have impacted pedagogical practices in schools where the image is slowly replacing text and students increasingly learn curriculum content visually". However, the authors of the Prospect books series have paid little to no attention to the authenticity, appropriateness and attractiveness of the pictures.

It is evident that learning is more effective when sensory experiences are stimulated since students learn best by observing, listening, and copying what they have seen or heard. English for Schools books have provided a CD for the above-mentioned reason. However, the audio material developed for the book was either unavailable or hard to get for most of the class and it was not the only problem we faced trying to use audiovisual aids to teach. The audio was not recorded with native speakers and had risen the question of authenticity as well.

Last but not least, teaching vocabulary in context has proven to be so much more effective than teaching vocabulary in isolated lists, but the context should be real and authenticate which Prospect books have not been able to deliver. Regardless, we need to provide our students with ample opportunities to learn words in their actual context, which we later focused on finding words that were either in groups or chunks to help establish a relation for our students between them.

DATA ANALYSIS

The results showed that about 64 percent of the students of 7th grade of junior high school in Darab were not happy with their schoolbooks. Considering they had no prior experience with any other book, this is a high level of dissatisfaction with the book. Many of the students could not relate to the pictures of the book because of it being not authentic or outdated. Seeing as 75% of them were not content with the book’s design, some changes were necessary to be made to bring the students’ attention back to the lesson.

As laid out in the chart below, not only were the students unhappy with the visual material of the book, but also their teachers could see that it had little to no positive effect on their students.

The audio materials were not easily accessible for 78 percent of the students and about 68 percent of them believed that the materials were not useful or effective for them.

Almost half of the students liked vocabulary tasks, which we later on focused as our main approach for teaching with games. Speaking and reading exercises were the second and third most-liked book exercises. Also over 13 percent of them chose grammar practices and other exercises as their favorites.

The students pretty much liked the same English exercises of the book and of the English language learning. The data also showed that a significant number of student were interested in group activities as well.

THE FINDINGS

According to the data gathered from various students and teachers, the package developed for the research showed a significant rise in score and students’ engagement and helped them to learn more efficiently.

Not only did every one of the students displayed at least 15 percent of improvement in posttests, but also they were more self-confident and encouraged to learn English. They showed a lot of enthusiasm toward changing their approach in the class reportedly.

APPENDICES

3 Questioners

3 Pre-tests

3 Posttests

6 Interviews

2 Class Transcripts

3 Game Packages (developed specifically for the research)

Note: Because of the lack of access to students in schools due to the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19), two of the questionnaires and two of the posttests were implemented online through porseshnameonline.com services

REFERENCES

1. Heron, J. 1996. Cooperative Inquiry: Research into the human condition. London: Sage.

2. Reason & Bradbury, Handbook of Action Research, 2nd Edition. London: Sage, 2007.

3. Lewin, K. (1946) Action research and minority problems. J Soc.

4. Griva, E., Semoglou, K., & Geladari, A. (2010). Early foreign language learning: implementation of a project in a game–based context.

5. Multiple Intelligences Oasis, Howard Gardner

6. Patersonová, K. (1996). Připravit, pozor, učíme se! Praha: Portál.

7. Lee Su Kim. (1995). “Creative Games for the Language Class”

'Forum' Vol. 33 No 1, January -, Page 35.

8. Aydan Ersoz. (2000). “Six Games for the EFL/ESL Classroom” The internet TESL. Journal, Vol. VI, No. 6.

9. Walsh, 20 10, p. 24-25

10. Guiding School Improvement With Action Research by Richard Sagor

11. Larson & Marsh, 2005, loc. 1888

12. Cole, Cole & Lightfoot. 2005.p. 536

13. Masheder.1989.p. 3

14. Langran & Purcell.1994. p.12-14

15. Chang, Wu, Weng, & Sung, 2012; Meluso, Zheng, Spires, & Lester, 2012

16. Koran, S., Kornhaber, M., Gardner, H., 2006, p. 23

Email me for any details: Alireza.Abedizadeh@Gmail.com