Learning grammar with edutainment activities in high schools

This study consists of quantitative and qualitative parts. English Grammar lessons are found to be more monotonous and boring than the other skills such as reading, listening and speaking. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of extra?curricular Edutainment activities (activities which both entertain and educate) which are thought to do away the boredom and monotony of the Grammar lessons on the students? attitude towards English lessons. The study was carried out in the Süper Lise part (Foreign Language centred High School) of Buca Lisesi (Buca High School) on the preparatory classes ( prep-A and prep-C) in the second term of the 2004?2005 academic year. The quantitative parts of the study consist of the extra?curricular edutainment activities prepared by the researcher after determining the weak and strong points in the students? Multiple Intelligences and taking into consideration students? age and level of English, a Multiple Intelligences Inventory and an English attitude scale developed by Assistant Prof. Dr. Ugur ALTUNAY. Two preparatory classes were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups; prep-C as the experimental and prep-A as the control groups. Prior to the initiation of the study the extra?curricular edutainment activities were prepared in line with the subjects of the course book units taken into consideration. After the results obtained from the Multiple Intelligences Inventory, edutainment activities such as songs and music, games, poetry and humour and jokes were chosen as the primary activities to be infused in the curriculum. In both of the preparatory classes the lessons were delivered by the researcher, who followed lessons enriched with extra?curricular edutainment activities in the experimental group and lessons only following the course book in a traditional communicative methodology in the control group (New Bridge to Success 2). Both the experimental and control group were given the English Attitude Scale as pre-test and post-test. In the qualitative part of the study after the treatment semi-structured interview questions were prepared to investigate the students? thoughts on the application of the edutainment activities in their Grammar lessons. For the analysis of the data gathered from the English lesson attitude scale the SPSS computer program 11.0 was used. For the analysis of the M.I. Inventory the criteria provided by Özden (2003) was used. For the qualitative part a descriptive analysis was used to summarize and comment on the data. The findings obtained from the pre-application and post-application English attitude scale indicate that the difference is insignificant (p < 0.05). This is to say that the extra?curricular edutainment activities did not have a significant effect in changing the students? attitude towards the English lessons in a positive way.