A study on sympathetic tendency of efl learners through competition games

Sympathy which is an emotion that is required for people to direct their lives since it enables to build healthy relationships by experiencing the same feeling with other persons (Decety & Chaminade, 2003) differs from empathy that means putting oneself in another's place (Tuncay & İl, 2009). Sympathetic tendency is also a term used to express the penchant towards people or things that is a new term in educational field. This study is the first experimental research working on sympathetic tendency in ELT field. This research aims to seek answer whether there is a relation between various competition games played in ELT classrooms and sympathetic tendency of EFL learners towards English lesson. The study was carried on 302 participants consisting of 9th grade students from Istanbul Gaziantepliler Anatolian High School, Gaziantep. These participants were divided into two groups by random sampling as experimental and control groups. Within the 15 weeks of experimental process of the study, various competition games designed by the researcher according to participants' and English curriculum' needs were played with the experimental group unlike the control group which continued their lessons without playing games. The sympathetic tendency questionnaire was applied at the 14th week so as to discover whether there is a relation between the various competition games and sympathetic tendency of participants towards English lesson and a vocabulary knowledge test was applied as pre and post-test to see the progress and find whether there is an effect of various competition games on students' vocabulary knowledge. According to the T-test results used to analyze the collected data from sympathetic tendency questionnaire, the sympathetic tendency of students did not change when experimental and control groups' results were compared. However, according to sympathetic tendency results compared to genders (t=3.599; p=.000), female participants' results (M=139.68) were higher than males participants (M=128.78). The results demonstrated that when the groups were examined according to gender separately, the female participants' results (t=3.400; p=.001) (M=141.26) were higher in experimental group, but there were no significant differences according to genders in control group. The results indicated that female participants had higher sympathetic tendency towards English lesson than males. According to T-Test results of vocabulary test revealed that there were no significant differences according to pre-test results between the groups; however, post-test results (t=12.762; p=.000) illustrated that post-test results of experimental group (M=34.23) were higher than the post-test results of control group (M=24.18). One of the other results of the study demonstrated that various competition games were practical to improve vocabulary knowledge EFL learners in Turkey. In addition to that, the results stated that various competition games were effective to improve participants' collaboration skills that help improving sympathetic tendency according to T-test results between the experimental (M=4.57) and control group (M=4.29) (t=2.484; p=.014). Keywords: Sympathy, competition games, sympathetic tendency, empathy