The Future of Education

Learning a foreign language involves developing a large vocabulary, and innovative approaches are needed to enhance vocabulary acquisition when teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to K-12 students. This study aims to investigate how game-based course design can improve vocabulary acquisition and retention in the context of EFL in China. For this study, a public primary school was selected as the setting. The participants were fourth-grade students chosen through convenience sampling. To determine the target vocabulary, the participants took a pre-test, which was created by the researchers based on the content of the language curriculum. The students received vocabulary instruction that included vocabulary games for a duration of three weeks. After each instructional session, participants completed immediate post-tests to assess their vocabulary gains. Two weeks following the intervention, the participants took a delayed post-test to evaluate their retention levels. The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS with a paired-sample t-test. Even though there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the immediate post-test and delayed post-test, the mean difference was still found to be close to each other, with 24.37 and 21.32 out of 30, respectively. This indicates that the students’ retention level did not show a huge decrease despite the two-week interval.