Vocabiventures

Vocabiventures is a card game I designed for teaching vocabulary in middle-school English lessons. The class splits into explorer teams of five and an adventure card is turned over. If it is a creature, the team fights it with the equipment cards in hand, and each word only counts if they pronounce it right and say what it means. If it is a treasure, they get an open task: build a sentence, find a synonym or an opposite. One game fits into one lesson.

Three roles rotate inside each team. The Leader speaks for the group. The Right Hand fixes their own team’s mistakes. The Interrupter catches the other team’s mistakes and takes the points. Roles change hands every round, so the student who never speaks in class ends up as spokesperson too. The words come from the national curriculum for grades 5 to 7, and every equipment card shows the grade and unit it belongs to. Four decks, around two hundred cards.

Under TÜBİTAK’s 2209-A programme we took the game into a classroom as a research project at Pamukkale University. We worked with two seventh-grade classes at a state school in Denizli for six weeks: one with the game, one with regular lessons. Between the pre-test and the post-test, the game group’s average rose from 66 to 76 and the other group’s from 88.5 to 92. The difference is statistically significant.

I do not want to make this result bigger than it is. The two groups did not start from the same place, and a group that starts near the ceiling has less room to climb. What stayed with me from the interviews was not a number anyway. It was students who never spoke in class putting their hands up once they became the Interrupter. The study ran with ethics-board and parental approval and was presented at the 22nd INGED International ELT Conference. The paper is drafted and not yet published.