A Research On The Application Of Educational Games To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

Vocabulary teaching in primary school is one of the most important English teaching contents.However,isolated vocabulary learning tends to be boring,contrary to the pragmatic style of primary school students.Educational games mean turning boring language phenomena into lively and interesting teaching forms that students are willing to accept.The study aims are to explore how to use educational information resources to create game scenarios and improve vocabulary teaching.Specifically,this thesis tries to answer the following two research questions:(1)Does the use of educational games improve students' vocabulary learning?(2)Can educational games stimulate pupils' interest in learning English vocabulary?The research design mainly adopts the classroom teaching experiment.The survey tools include English proficiency test,vocabulary test,questionnaire and interviews.The teaching experiment lasted from September 2017 to November 2017.The experimental subjects were 80 students in two parallel classes at the fifth grade of Xinmin Primary School in Minqin county.According to the final exam scores of last semester,the average grade,pass rate and excellent rate of the two classes were slightly different,so the author selected one of the two classes as the EC and the other class as the CC.There were three English lessons each week for the two classes,and the textbook was of the fifth grade edited by FLTRP.In the EC,the author focused on the creation of the game scene.Traditional teaching methods were used in CC(except educational games).In the course of the experiment,the pretest and post-test were carried out.The data were analyzed by SPSS17.0 software package.The results show that:(1)Most teachers and students think that educational games are very useful.However,teachers lack the theoretical guidance in the use of the games,the teaching time in the classroom is limited,and only simple and easy-to-use games are used;(2)The vocabulary size of students in EC was significantly larger than that of CC;(3)Students in EC also showed significantly higher interest in learning vocabulary than CC.Research shows that educational games can improve the effectiveness of primary English vocabulary teaching.When creating educational games,teachers should stimulate their learning interest,enrich learning forms,enable students to learn more confidently,cultivate students' social emotional attitudes,integrate educational games with English teaching courses and provide students with reasonable guidance.