An Action Research On Motivating Vocational School Students To Learn Vocabulary Through Game-like Activities

Vocabulary is the most important element of a language and learning vocabulary isone of the unavoidable aspects in learning a language. Hence, creating students'motivation in learning English vocabulary and improving their vocabulary learning abilityis significant for both teachers and students.During the daily teaching, the writer finds a phenomenon that the vocational schoolstudents are often interested in all kinds of entertainment activities and sports games,which triggers the writer to think of the following questions: (1) Can game-like activitiesmotivate vocational students to learn vocabulary? (2) Can game-like activities help toimprove students'vocabulary learning abilities? Keeping the questions in mind, the writerfirst searches all the theories of learning motivation, vocabulary learning and teaching, aswell as games in vocabulary teaching to prove the feasibility of teaching vocabularythrough games theoretically. And then the writer carries out a 12-week action research inone class with 30 students in a vocational school in Chongwen district, Beijing.According to the whole procedures of this action research, this thesis is organized inthe following five chapters: Chapter one is an introduction, which provides the background,the research questions and the significance of the research. Chapter two consists ofliterature review. The writer reviews the theories of learning motivation, vocabularylearning and teaching, as well as the effectiveness of games in vocabulary teaching toprove the feasibility of teaching vocabulary through games theoretically. Chapter threeargues the rationale to take an action research, and gives a detailed description about the subjects, instruments, and procedure of the research. Chapter four reports the wholeprocess of the 12-week action research in the form of weekly reports, analyzes the resultsof the teacher's logs, classroom observations, interview, questionnaires and vocabularytests, and sums up the outcome of the research results. Chapter five concludes the actionresearch that teaching vocabulary through game activities can create students'motivationto learn vocabulary effectively as well as harmonize the relationship between teacher andstudents. In addition, this part also discusses the limitations and the implications of theresearch.