The impact of educational games and gender on five-year-old iraqi efl learners

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 participants of the study were 32 preschool children at Wano private kindergarten. They were divided into two different groups; the experimental group which was taught by educational games and the control group which was exposed to the traditional methods of teaching English vocabulary, there were 16 students for each group (8 male and 8 female). A Checklist was used as Data collection instrument which consist of 36 EFL vocabulary items. At the beginning of the study, they were given a pretest to measure their vocabulary performance. Then, after six weeks of treatment, they were given posttest. The outcomes showed a significance difference between the 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 non-significant gender effect for both groups in learning new English vocabulary.