The Effects Of Three Types Of Games In Students’ Vocabulary Learning In Primary School

With the popularity of English, the importance of acquiring vocabulary has been focused by more and more people. As the foundation of language learning, vocabulary plays an essential role in improving learners’English comprehensive competence. But the high rate of words forgetfulness is one of the main problems for all learners, especially for students who are in elementary school. Hence, how to keep and deepen students’ words retention has become an urgent issue that needs to be figured out as soon as possible. Learning English in primary school is the foremost period to establish students’ good learning habits and cultivate their innovation capability. Obviously, at the elementary stage, teachers play crucial roles in students’ vocabulary learning so they try to apply various kinds of games to classroom to cater for the pupils’ interests and needs in the hope to help their words retention. As an energetic and creative teaching method, vocabulary teaching through games can not only capture students’ attention successfully but also can deepen their memory of vocabulary. Thus, the application of games in vocabulary teaching has its practical significance in reducing the problem of the high rate of words forgetfulness. Currently, many studies have been done in comparison with game teaching method and traditional teaching method but only few studies on the effect of applying different types of games to words memory.Therefore, with the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this study tries to get answers for the following two questions:1. What are the problems in current vocabulary teaching in primary schools? 2. What are the different effects on primary school student’ short-term and long-term words memory by applying three types of games, namely, perform-play game, reaction game and cooperative game? Many other research methods are also used in this study, including questionnaire, classroom observation and empirical approach. Firstly, through classroom observation, the current situation of vocabulary teaching in primary school can be known, which is aimed at finding out some problems on vocabulary teaching. Secondly, both questionnaires for teachers and students are conducted to get to know their attitudes to apply games to vocabulary teaching as well as seek out some reasons of vocabulary teaching problems. Finally, three parallel classes from Gao Yinxiang Primary School in Hangzhou will be chosen randomly as the experimental classes. Meanwhile, three types of games will be used in vocabulary teaching among these classes respectively. After the experiments, the instant test for students’ short-term memory will be completed immediately while the delayed test for their long-term words retention will be finished one week later. Then all the relevant data will be collected and analyzed by SPSS.From the results of classroom observation and questionnaires, most of teachers and students show their positive attitudes to vocabulary teaching through games. However, the traditional teaching method like repeating words mechanically is still applied to vocabulary teaching nowadays. The results of experiment reveal that in the domain of short-term and long-term memory, these three game teaching methods have no different effects on students’ short-term memory but they produce significant difference on their long-term words’ retention. According to the efficiency for pupils’ long-term memory of target words, reaction game has the best effect among three games and perform-play game has better effect than cooperative game. Then this paper will put forward some reasonable suggestions for students to deepen their words memory.