The effect of taboo gameon seventh grade students' English vocabulary learning levels

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of Taboo game that is a word game, on the seventh grade secondary school students' success on vocabulary knowledge. And also it was purposed to investigate the students'opinions about vocabulary learning with Taboo game. This research was carried out with 92 seventh grade students attending English classes at a religious secondary school in Tokat province during the first term of 2018-2019 Academic Year. In this research, a pre-test post-test half experimental design with control group was used. There are two experimental and two control groups in the research. The vocabulary teaching in the units is done with Taboo game in the experimental groups while it is done by using the traditional method (straight lecture, question-answer) in the control groups. The study lasted for 7 weeks including 4 teaching hours per week. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools were used in the research to obtain the data regarding the identified problems. "Vocabulary Achievement Test" developed by the researcher was applied as pre-test and post-test in both control and experimental groups. An "Open Ended Written Questionaire" developed by the researcher was used in order to obtain the views of the students in the experimental groups related to teaching vocabulary with Taboo game. SPSS 15.00 software was used for the analyses of the quantitative data obtained in this study and significance level was assumed to be p< 0.05 TAP 6 programme was used to conduct the analyses after the result of trial application of Vocabulary Achievement Test and item difficulty and discrimination indices, variance, standard deviation, mean and KR-20 calculations were done. In addition to this, students' opinions concerning vocabulary teaching with Taboo game are gathered given under certain headings and frequency values about the datas are given. The results of the analysis of the Vocabulary Test show that when compared with pre-test results, the success of the students in Experimental 1, Experimental 2,Control 2 groups increased significantly and the success of the students in Control 1 group increased very little, but this little increase was not significant at all. Also It was concluded that there was a significant difference between the average scores of pre-test and post-test difference scores of Experimental 1 and Control 1 groups and Experimental 2 and Control 2 groups. According to these results, it can be seen that the technique used in this research, teaching vocabulary with Taboo game had a very positive effect on students' vocabulary success and their opinionsabout learning vocabulary with Taboo game. However, in this study low success groups Experimental 1 and Control 1 and high success groups Experimental 2 and Control 2 groups are compared with each other. As a result; both in low success groups and high success groups Taboo game created a significant difference in students' vocabulary learning process. So this result is an important datashowing that Taboo game is a very efficient technique in vocabulary teaching. For the qualitative part of the study, case study was used as research design. In this context, 48 students in the experimental groups were applied an "Open- Ended Written Questionairre" to get their opinions about the vocabulary teaching with Taboo game. It was understood from the responses of the students that the students have positive attitudes towards Taboo game and vocabulary teaching with taboo game had a positive effect on students'attitudes towards learning vocabulary, on their academic success and on their interpersonal relationships. Also, the students stated that their power of expression in English increased with Taboo game and the vocabulary learned with Taboo game was more permanent in their mind. Moreover, the students said that their self confidence didn't disappear because nobody was angry with them and so they felt relaxed during the game. The most important statement most of the students made was that learning vocabulary with Taboo game was both enjoyable and instructive. In addition to this, they expressed that they could learn more vocabulary with Taboo game. In this research it is also seen that both low and high success group students got the same benefit from vocabulary teaching with Taboo game in terms of success and attitude. As far as attitude was concerned, it was understood from the Open Ended Questionnaire that all of the high success group students have positive attitude towards learning vocabulary with Taboo game and 95% of low success group students have positive attitude towards learning vocabulary with Taboo game.This shows that Taboo game is a very useful tecnique for classroom applications.