2. The Practical Challenges of Implementing Games in Teaching Vocabulary to Young Learner

It seems that both teachers and students would not face any difficulties in teaching and learning vocabulary learning using games. However the observation and interviews reveal that sometimes games create challenges for both students and teachers.

The first, since games can attract student’s, most of the time it causes noise and unorganized classroom condition. Sometimes they do too much movement and talk too much. When the students are excited, they become very active and sometimes uncontrollable. In this case, teacher needs to understand very well the students characteristic to work with the students and how to manage the class As stated by Brown (2001) A teacher should be able to recognize her students characteristics to create good learning environment.

The second, the teacher needs to be creative in improving variety of games so there is no chance for the students to drag their attention to something else. This is supported by Harmer (2001), They cannot be expected to sit down and do particular activity for long time. They are very easy to get bored, lose interest after several minutes of the activity. More over as we already known one of characteristics of young learners is they have a limited attention span, unless activities are extremely engaging they can easily get bored, losing interest after ten minutes or so. Regarding to this issue variety of activity seems to be an essential part of the learning process. Based on the interview done with the teacher, it showed that teacher needs to be creative in using games in teaching vocabulary besides that teacher’s peer consultation and searching from internet was helpful in giving more idea of activities.

Peneliti : Sumber-sumber apa saja yang Ibu gunakan untuk mendapatkan jenis games yang akan digunakan dalam kelas?

Responden: Saya lebih sering improve sendiri atau konsultasi dengan teman yang sudah lebih lama bekerja di sini. Selain itu biasanya juga saya search dari internet.

The third, from the researcher observation notes, students tend to speak in their mother language instead of English during the game and also the class session. They often used their mother language (Bahasa Indonesia or Sundaneese dialect) in communicating with their friends and teacher. It can be seen from the transcript bellow:

Teacher: Ok, next (showing the living room picture).

Student: Kitchen!

Teacher: No..

Student: Living room!

Teacher: Living room… very good! (scoring the Oscar group)

Student: Lagi!

And also from this following transcript:

Teacher: Yes, again. (Showing the bedroom picture).

Student 1: Living room!

Student 2: Kitchen!

Student 3: Bathroom!

Student 4: Salah! Itu teh… bedroom!

The teacher during the game and the class session most of the time used English, sometimes she explained and said some word in Bahasa Indonesia after she said it in English. The teacher also responded the students with English when they spoke in Bahasa Indonesia. This is the good thing in coping the problem of using mother language in the class, so that the students will be encouraged to speak in English words.

The fourth, from the researcher’s observation notes by doing games the teacher only had a little time to drill the vocabularies given. The students did not have enough time to do repetition and practice in saying the word properly to help them in memorizing all the new vocabularies. So as the result, the students often made mistake in guessing the pictures that were showed by the teacher.

The fifth, from the class observation it was found that kind of game implemented by the teacher in the class could lead the students to be reluctant to speak. Sometime the students preferred showing the words to guess the pictures that were showed by the teacher instead of saying them. This gave them a little opportunity practice saying the words since not all the time the teacher help them to say the words.