Enhancing Adult Learners’ Motivation for Learning English Grammar through Language Games

Abstract

Grammar, although indispensable for successful communication, is always a dry subject for most learners and needs a high motivation for learning.  Motivating language learners for learning grammar of English in Pakistan has always been a challenging task for the language instructors. This study investigated whether language games motivate adult learners for learning grammar or not. Language games were adopted as a motivational strategy for teaching English grammar to a sample of 31 male and 19 female first-year undergraduates of Islamia College Peshawar, who were not studying English as a major subject; their ages ranged between 19 to 22 years and they spoke Pashto as mother tongue. After teaching them grammar for one semester, the instructors—the researchers themselves—sought their feedback on the use of games through a 25-item questionnaire comprising sub-sets such as interest, satisfaction, effort, tension, choice, usefulness, competition, and pre- and post-treatment experience of learning grammar. The findings of the study manifest that language games motivate not only young learners but also adult language learners. It was suggested that teaching-learning activity based on games should be made an integral part of the course of students of primary and high schools, in addition to being made a part of the primary and high school teacher education.