Games & Drama Applications in Language Acquisition

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This research aims to reveal the effects of games and drama practical applications on language acquisition for pre-school children. “Game & Drama in Language Acquisition” training program has been applied to 4-6-year-old children attending pre-school educational institutions, and the results were analyzed respectively. The study comprises 126 volunteering parents and 126 children attending pre-school institutions. At the same time, 32 teachers have evaluated the activities. The content of the training program includes modules with game & drama activities that aim to strengthen language acquisition in pre-school children. Data collection tools were the Vocabulary Performance Checklist to analyze the concepts and words acquired by children; Identification Scale of Preschool Teachers' Opinions on Game Activities to reveal the parents' views. In the data analysis, in order to determine the differences of the answers reported by the experimental and control groups in the pre-test and post-test, analyzes were performed for independent groups using t-test, variance analysis, and Mann Whitney U test. The statistical results of the data have revealed that games and drama activities supporting language acquisition increase the level of effectiveness significantly when applied together with parental training and that using games and drama in the preschool period is an effective method for the children's development of self-expression and language using skills consciously.