Developing supplementary materials fourth grade English classes at a public school in Yerevan

Abstract

To create a stress-free and friendly environment and enhance learners’ motivation and make the learners more relaxed, games and gamified activities can be supporting material. This study aimed to create an extracurricular course for public school pupils in Yerevan by implementing games in teaching English to develop four skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. As defined by Hadfield (2007), activities with goals and rules that make the process fun are called games. In this project, games are defined as activities and interactive online worksheets taken from different free educational websites. Instead of just completing exercises, the learners completed choosing the correct picture, gap filling, finding the correct word, vocabulary games, etc. (examples are provided in the lesson plans). The project participants are 4th-grade schoolchildren aged 9-10 at a public school in Yerevan. The needs analysis was done through an online questionnaire completed by the participants' parents, the teacher’s online interview questions, and a placement test completed by all student participants. Some of the worksheets presented under the Scope and Sequence were chosen based on the vocabulary presented in the book English IV, giving the students an opportunity to revise the vocabulary learned. Some of the worksheets were not especially listening ones that were not connected to the overall lesson, but those were familiar songs; this allowed the learners to learn the lyrics of those songs, as, after the class, they asked for the links to learn the songs by heart.