A Study of Application of Games in Children English Teaching—Taking Children English Class in Education First Training School for Example

Abstract

Throughout the development of children, games play an indispensable role in contrast to education in their daily life. Children’s emotional and intellectual growth is supposed to be accompanied with games, such as Eagle \& Chicken, Handkerchief, etc. It engages people in making learning fun, motivates a desire for children to communicate, and creates unpredictability about their potentials. What is more, games also have been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields, including sporting class, music class, and second language acquisition. Gaming is becoming a new form of interactive content, worthy of exploration and the process just confirms the remark “interest is the best teacher”. The 21st century places new demands on student learning, then a new combination between games and teaching has been on a burgeoning stage for educators, especially in English class, which is called “game-based learning”. As the name suggests, this teaching method is built on the hypothesis that games are the key classroom managements which make lessons more vivid and children more concentrated. It stresses extensive practices in a rewarding language context so that a very enjoyable and educational environment will be created at a primary level, particularly in second language acquisition for children. Under this condition, game-based learning (GBL) has been highly developed in Western countries, such scholars as Joanne E. Oppenheim (1984) held the idea that play is by its very nature educational. And it should be pleasurable. When the fun goes out of play, most often so does the learning. On the other hand, in China, because of the impact of the traditional teaching methodology and the lack of substantial experience about game-based teaching, the long history of the research on it seems not enough to achieve the expected goal. Game-based learning cannot be used appropriately or its powerful potentials are not motivated. It has not been massively applied in the public school; however, in some institutions of English Education, like Education First,