Pilot study on the effectiveness of the "Relax 2" board-game in improving vocabulary and sentence formation sills in Romanian

Abstract

"Board-games constitute a tool that simultaneously develops children in many ways and motivates them to learn. The aim of this experiment is to examine the effectiveness of using boardgames in Romanian lessons and how the attitudes of Hungarian children change towards the Romanian language. To this end, the author created a board-game for Hungarian speaking children. The aim of the game is to bring the children closer to the Romanian language, to make it possible for them to playfully master the key words in the topics present in the elementary classes, to increase their existing vocabulary, and to develop their sentence-forming skills. 21 children participated in the research. The children learned 14 topics during the experiments, of which 7 topics were learned using traditional methods and also 7 topics were learned using the board-game. To measure the level of knowledge, the children wrote a test at the beginning and at the end of each lesson. The results show that children were able to learn more words using board-games than using traditional methods. It also became clear that when using board games, more than half of the children (56.46%) managed to form a correct sentence, while when using traditional methods, far less than half (35.37%) were able to form a correct sentence. By the end of the experiment, the children liked the Romanian lessons and their learning motivation increased significantly."