The attitudes of very young learners towards the use of games in language classes

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of games on teaching English vocabulary to very young learners and to analyze the attitudes of these learners towards games in vocabulary teaching. Learning a language is a cognitive process which requires different steps, tasks and methods. Today, most of the children worldwide are taught English as their foreign language from very early ages. Turkey is one of the countries in which English is the most taught foreign language. There have been several researches and studies to understand the best ways of teaching English to very young learners. This study is carried out in a kindergarten environment with twenty, five year old children. Besides analysing the studies on this subject, the basic method of this study is mostly visual and verbal which includes observation and interviews at the end of each lesson. The observation group is consisted of twenty children who were observed three times a week for six weeks. Their English lessons lasted forty minutes. At the end of the classes, they were interviewed about the vocabulary they learnt and the games they played during the lessons. A variety of games was observed in the vocabulary classes for five year old children who proved the effectiveness of the games for vocabulary teaching.