The effect of card game as a means of reinforcement in teaching English vocabulary to elementary school students

Teaching English to Elementary school students is very important, because English, a foreign language, which is needed in international communication. Then, the objective of language teaching is the students mastery in language skill, namely: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. In order to achieve that objective; vocabulary plays an important role. Therefore, initial teaching-learning activities should be stressed on the students' vocabulary building. To improve the students' vocabulary, the writer uses card game in teaching English vocabulary. This technique helps a teacher to break the routine activity, avoid the boredom, and arise the students' motivation as well as attract them to participate in the classroom activities. Motivation plays an important role for the success of teaching learning process. Because children like games, the writer suggests card game as a means of teaching vocabulary. Card game is really effective and useful Many experts use games in teaching learning activities because games have been proved to have a great deal of value. The subject of this study consists of the fourth year students of elementary school divided into one class as the experimental group and another one as the control group. The writer teaches the same material to both groups, but she uses card game in teaching vocabulary for the experimental group. Then for the control group the writer uses translation of word list. After all of the treatments, the writer find that using card games as a means of teaching vocabulary is more effective than using translation of word list. Moreover, card game can lead to more sincere interest and decrease the students' boredom in learning vocabulary. At last, the investigation gives some suggestions to improve and develop the students' vocabulary. A teacher who wants to use card game should consider when to use, how to play and what card game is. To prove the effectiveness of the card game, the writer hopes a further research will be done to implement some suggested card game