Abstract
English curriculum for elementary school students started since e few years ago and children’s learning English has become a popular topic. Developing students’ communicative ability is the government and teachers’ shared goal, so the guideline of Nine-year Integrated Curriculum was designed based on the principles of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). Games have been regarded as a common skill of CLT for enhancing children’ learning of a foreign language. Therefore, teachers are encouraged to design proper communicative activities to encourage students’ active participation of learning. In contrast, through the investigation and observation of classroom activities and textbook design, it was noticed that fewer communicative activities are used and drills occupied much class time. Two reasons were provided to explain the phenomenon. First, CLT does not provide concrete methods, which may lead to difficulties or confusion of activity design. Second, teachers and editors believe that drills are helpful for language learning. For the second reason, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of communicative games and drills in teaching children grammar and how students response to the different activities. Eighty-seven English-as-a-foreign-language sixth graders were recruited to receive a one-month instruction of singular past tense. A pretest, a posttest, a delayed posttest, and an attitude questionnaire were used as instruments for data collection. Students were randomly assigned to the drill group, game group, and control group. The drill group followed the traditional teaching method with several kinds of drills. The game group participated in three communicative games designed according to the three principles: information gap, choice, and feedback (Johnson & Morrow, 1981). The control group received explicit instruction of rules only. Through data analyses, the following findings were obtained. First, the three groups achieved significant gains on the posttest. Among three tests, ANOVA showed significant differences on the reading and oral test in favor of the game group, but no difference was found on the listening test. Second, the delayed posttest showed the drill and game group had slight improvement. The game group was superior to the drill group on the reading test, but no difference on the other tests. Third, the results of attitude questionnaires showed students’ positive attitudes toward the two activities. The results of the study showed that communicative games could foster students’ learning of grammar and had equal or better effectiveness than drills. Moreover, it is suggested that games are beneficial to students’ interest of learning of English and their interaction with peers. With regards to directions for future refinements on developing communicative games, research methods which could enhance better understanding of students’ attitudes and proficiency were recommended.