THE IMPACT OF EDUCATIONAL GAMES AND GENDER ON FIVE YEAR OLD IRAQI EFL LEARNERS

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of educational games as a significant learning technique in teaching English Vocabulary among five-year old Iraqi EFL learners. The sample of the study was 32 preschool children at Wano private kindergarten. They were divided into two different groups; experimental group which were taught by using educational games and control group which were exposed to the traditional methods of vocabulary teaching, 16 students for each group (8 male and 8 female). Checklist was used as Data collection instrument which consisted of 36 items vocabulary. At the beginning of the study they were given a pretest to measure their vocabulary performance. Then, after six weeks of treatment, they were post tested. The outcomes showed a significant difference between experimental group and the control group in terms of posttest achievement in English vocabulary scores. Therefore, the educational games proved to be useful in teaching English vocabulary. Furthermore, the influence of gender on five-years-old Iraqi preschool kids in learning new English vocabulary with educational games in the experimental group and without educational games in the control group was conducted by means of independent sample t-tests. The analyzed data showed no significant gender effect for both groups in learning new English vocabulary.

Keywords: English as a foreign language, vocabulary teaching, educational games, very young learners, early childhood education, Total Physical response, five-year-old children.

Keywords

• English as a foreign language,vocabulary teaching,educational games,very young learners,early childhood education,Total Physical response

References

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