Teacher’s Perspective on the Use of Games in English Teaching
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Learning Process: A study at Bethany Elementary School
Abstract
Recently, games are widly used by teachers in teaching and learning process since games are one of the important tools in EFL as stated by McCallum (1980) and Mubaslat (2012). Through this study, the writer investigated the teachers’ perception toward the use of games in teaching English for young learners and types of games used by the teachers. This study was conducted in the first and the second grade of Bethany Elementary School Salatiga, with two participants of English teachers. Observation and interviews were used as instruments of data collection. The findings show that there were six types of games, which are Order; Connect: compare, match, group; Do: move, mime, draw, obey; Remember; Identify: discriminate,
guess, speculate and Create found used by the teachers. In addition, the findings also indicate that teachers have positive perception towards games, since they can contribute to improve the students’ language skills, build their grammar understanding, engage the students to learn the lesson, help them to expand their vocabulary and help the teachers to see the students’ actual ability. However, the observed teachers also view that games can be boring and time consuming. Games are also demanding in terms of background knowledge and giving difficulty for the teachers to control the classroom management. Therefore, the observed teachers gave some sugggestion to minimize the problems.
