Developing vocabulary skills using didactic games at the slovene course

The Master's thesis deals with the development of vocabulary skills using didactic games at the Slovene course at Primary School level. It consists of theoretical and empirical work. I based the theoretical part of the thesis on the notion of communicative competence and its components, linguistic ability and vocabulary skills. After introducing the concept of communicative competence and its composition, I further presented what the vocabulary skills are and how they should be developed in the classroom. I presented the concept of a word, I listed and described the semantic relationships between words, and the formation and comparison of adjectives and prepositions; these are some of the learning topics related to developing vocabulary skills that are learned in the first three years of Primary School. Then I presented a concept of game, its purpose and the role of the adult in it, and I also listed and described different types of children's games. Afterwards I focused on didactic games; I introduced the concept of didactic games, listed different types of it as well as benefits of using them in the classroom. I reviewed the curriculum for Slovenian language in Primary Schools and examined what it says on the use of didactic games in teaching. I explored the role of a teacher in the planning and implementation of didactic games in the classroom. In the empirical part I aimed to find out whether students learn more during lessons using didactic games or using classical/frontal teaching. For this purpose I made seven didactic games myself and tried them out in the classroom. I included students of two third grade classes in the study. In one class I taught target material with didactic games while in the other class I taught in the classical/frontal way. Students of both classes later wrote a test. Students with whom I used didactic games completed the additional survey, and I also interviewed their teacher. With the empirical work I therefore tried to prove that the students who learnt using didactic games learnt the target material just as well or even better than those whose lessons were based on frontal teaching