A Study Of The Application Of Game Teaching In Primary School English Instruction

Since2001, English became a required lesson of primary school for students reachingGrade three in China. The Requirement of Primary School English Teaching (Implementation)points out, according to pupils’ physical and psychological characteristics as well as theirfeatures of study, English teaching at primary schools should be activity-oriented. Teachersneed to make full use of the instructional resources to teach students English by usinglistening, speaking, singing and playing for purpose of arousing pupils’ interests to learnEnglish, and to encourage them to join in activities and communication bravely. In trainingthose abilities, teachers often use the Game Teaching Method.However, there are some demerits of the Game Teaching Method in its application. First,the target goal of language instruction is ignored; second, not all the students take part in thegame during the instruction; third, games are either too easy or too difficult which are nothelpful in improving students’ language skill; fourth, games are often too complicated to do inclass which results in a waste of class time; fifth, games are not well structured and theorganization of game teaching lacks rationality. Therefore, research on overcoming thedemerits of Game Teaching and maximizing its positive function in primary school Englishteaching becomes necessary and meaningful.In order to testify the feasibility and positive effect of that method in primary schoolEnglish teaching, the author used a mode of systematic instructional design—the Dick andCarey Model to design game teaching systematically and conducted the experiment whichlasted two and a half months. The experiment was carried out at the South Street PrimarySchool of Chenliu County, Kaifeng City.100pupils from Grade Three were selected toparticipate the experiment. Class One is the experimental class and Class Two is the controlled class. The experimental data was from three sources: scores of seven timesexaminations in pretests and posttests; results of questionnaires for the students; the results ofinterview with English teachers. After analyzing the data, the author found that the GameTeaching Method has more advantages in stimulating pupils’ interest in learning, andimproving their learning efficiency. At the same time, the Game Teaching Method hasincomparable advantages in increasing their confidence and cultivating pupils’communicative ability.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction of the study. Thischapter introduces the background, the significance, the objective, the methodology of theresearch. Chapter two is the literature review about game, game teaching and instructionaldesign. Chapter three introduces the instructional systems design model—the Dick and CareyModel in detail. Chapter four is about the experiment and the data collection. Chapter five isabout the results of the experiment and the data analysis. Chapter six is the conclusion,including the major findings, the implication and the limitation of the research.