Comparing Game-based and Grammar-translation methods: the simple present tense in A1-A2 learners of English

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INTRODUCTION 
 
In 2014 I founded a project called Neturaltalk to experiment with methods 
that could be more effective in teaching languages. It is a project born in a 
well-known co-working space in Matera, Casa Netural. Neturaltalk means 
both talking naturally and creating a network of people to talk with. 
Speaking a language is mainly a social activity and the project aims to 
create opportunities for people from rural areas to learn a foreign language 
as they learnt their mother tongue, in an informal, comfortable and 
enjoyable way.    
In January 2014 an English teacher from Australia and I started the first 
Neturaltalk course. We started researching materials and ideas in books 
and on the internet. We found many activities and we started to 
experiment with them to see which were more effective. Although it is 
scientifically difficult to measure the effectiveness of a method we realised 
that when students felt safe and comfortable in our class, they started to 
feel confident and actively participate in lessons. We wanted to experiment 
with methods that were different from the Grammar Translation Method, 
which both of us experienced at school but with questionable results. We 
wanted to use a method, or a range of methods, that suited the majority of 
students. We wanted them to feel welcome in a non-judgemental 
environment in order to facilitate their learning process.  
We started thinking about games as tools to involve students. Playing is 
an activity that everybody has experienced once in their life and has 
helped to develop not only language skills but also emotional and social 
ones. We read a lot of research describing the potential of games in 
language learning. Thus, we started creating our set of own games to use 
during lessons. What students loved most was the possibility to actively 
use the language and the meaningful interactions they had with the other 
learners. They also appreciated the use of all senses during the lesson, 
e.g. listening to a song, watching a video, smelling, touching and trying 
some real food to activate all their senses. The variety of games and
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activities allowed everybody to find their own way to move closer to the 
target language. Recently, we started integrating the theory of multiple 
intelligences (Gardner, 1999), creating a list of games which are more 
suitable for each predominant intelligence. We realised that making people 
more conscious about the way they learn, empowers them and increases 
their long-term motivation.    
We also worked on the physical space with an architect. We created a 
room without desks but with colourful chairs and sofas. We set tables easy 
to move for activities that needed a surface. We bought a movable board 
and projector so to create a flexible environment, adaptable to the needs 
but also a place in which students could feel safe and happy.   
Moreover, we wanted to add another string to our bow that is summarised 
in this work.  
Firstly, we wanted to understand what neuroscience has discovered in the 
past few decades about the learning process. The debate of neuroscience 
in education is gaining a lot of interest and is increasingly impacting on 
educational thinking (Howard-Jones, 2012). Thus, in the first chapter the 
neuro psychological aspects of language learning are analysed. Paradis 
(2004) hypothesised at least four neuro functional modules (group of 
neurons) involved in the language process. But people that learn a second 
language, develop neural sub-systems in each of the four neuro functional 
modules (De Bot, in Kaplan, 2002). This means that learning a language 
expands neural connections. Moreover, when a learner is attending a 
foreign language course, not only grammatical features need to be taken 
into account. Hence, in the first chapter attention, memory, and emotion 
processes are also analysed from the neurological perspective. Being 
aware of them could impact teachers work and foreign language learners.  
After analysing the learning process, in the first chapter, some of the most 
influenced language teaching methods are evaluated in a generalised 
way. Whereas, the Grammar-translation and the Game-based method are 
deeply inspected and compared, because they are the focus of the 
experimental project, developed in the third chapter.
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In the second chapter the focus is on games and its ambiguous meaning. 
Throughout the centuries games have been studied from many 
perspectives. The socio-cultural, psychological, and pedagogical 
perspectives of games are described. From the pedagogical perspective, it 
is presented on ongoing research. It is a research funded by LEGO 
Foundation and carried out by Project Zero, the research centre of the 
Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). It aims to develop a 
Pedagogy of Play through a playful participatory approach, that involves 
the school community of the International School of Billund (ISB) in 
Denmark. Through this participatory process they are going to define what 
play and playful learning is, as well as create resources and tools, useful 
to teachers that wished to systemically bring more playful learning to 
schools. Its future development deserves to be followed.  
Finally, the third chapter is dedicated to the explanation of two teaching 
experiences that I run from April until June 2017 in collaboration with 
Neturaltalk. They aim to discover the impact of the Grammar-translation 
and the Game-based methods on two groups of six students with similar 
language knowledge level and similar sociolinguistic background. The 
Grammar-translation method is still the most widespread approach 
adopted by language teachers in Italian public schools (Balboni, Daloiso, 
2011). The Game-based method is a quite new and unusual vision of the 
learning process. It paradoxically combines chaos, loudness, unforeseen, 
pleasure with seriousness, order, programs, and goals. 
The two groups of students followed a twenty-hour English course and at 
the end they did the same final test. A specific linguistic item was tested, 
that is the third singular person present tense agreement morpheme-s. 
This item was chosen because of a hypothesis. If it is one of the most 
difficult rules to acquire at a basic level, the probability that the selected 
students wouldn’t have been able to use it spontaneously, were higher. 
So, the test results might show the impact that the two different methods 
would have on students, which hadn’t acquired the selected grammar item 
yet.
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FIRST CHAPTER 
HOW WE LEARN AND TEACH LANGUAGES 
Teaching a language is a complex process. In mathematics, the 
complexity of an operation is given by the number of factors that must be 
taken into account and the length of instructions needed to describe it 
(Boncinelli 2000).  
According to Balboni (2001), the adjective complex doesn’t mean difficult 
or chaotic. In language training field, it is the result of a set of factors: 
- A plurality of stakeholders who require (companies, public 
institutions, individual people) and offer (public schools, 
private institutions, individual people) language training. 
- A variety of decision-making centres (school autonomy, federalism 
proposals). 
- The fast transformation of both social context, and decisions that 
stakeholders have to make, to adapt to the changing environment in 
which they operate.  
On the other hand, learning a language is also a complex process. Indeed, 
many factors interact with it (Daloiso, 2009). They can be summarised in 
four dimensions:  
1. Neuropsychological dimension: the learning process is possible 
because specific neuropsychological mechanism occurs.  
2. Linguistic and communicative dimension: learning a language 
implies the acquisition of linguistic features (phonetics, phonology, 
morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics), as well as 
communicative ones (making the message understandable for 
other people, negotiating meanings and being able to say the right 
thing at the right moment) (Johnson and Morrow, 1982).  
3. Socio-cultural dimension: learning a language means to master a 
code that allows people to relate to each other in specific 
communicative environments. Furthermore, a language carries a
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culture on its back (Freddi, 1990a), e.g. lots of idioms are liked to 
specific cultural models.  
4. Education dimension: the learning process can occur in a natural or 
formal context. In a natural and spontaneous environment, it can 
change according to the quality of the input, the level of language 
exposure, the actual possibility of using it. While in a formal context, 
the language acquisition varies in relation to the approach, method, 
techniques and materials the teachers adopt, as well as the 
relationship teacher builds with students and the connections 
established among students. 
To better understand the complexity of the process, Daloiso makes an 
example (2006). An Italian as a foreign language teacher who will teach 
foreign children will take into account that: 1. the learning will be a long 
process that cannot be reduced to a few hours lessons a week; 2. the 
teacher should consider the learners’ L1 and their cultural background; 3. 
it would be crucial to understand if they had any post-migration living 
difficulties; 4. it would be important to consider the impact on Italian 
culture, the interference with their L1 and all psychological and 
neurological aspects linked to language acquisition in early childhood.  
Amongst these factors, the neuropsychological dimension will be 
discussed in this chapter for two reasons. Firstly, all dimensions are 
somehow related to our brain. Secondly, in the last twenty years, 
researchers have discovered extremely interesting and useful information 
about the brain itself, which arouses curiosity. They can be also helpful to 
teachers in educational settings to allow students to learn better, faster 
and more efficiently.  
For our research, understanding the brain structure can help us to discuss 
the differences between the neurological implications of grammar-
translation and game-based methods, the two methods compared in the 
experimentation described in the third chapter.  
Neuroscience studies the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and 
pharmacology of the nervous system (Collins Dictionary). Whereas,
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neurolinguistic studies the neurological processes underlying the 
development and use of language. For our research, we are going to 
consider both. As we have seen before (Daloiso, 2009), learning and 
using a language doesn’t only mean acquiring linguistic features. It 
involves wider aspects of the nervous system, like emotions, attention and 
memory processing. 
1.1Neurons at work:neuro functional modules, and neural 
subsystems 
In the following paragraph, we are going to describe the physiology of the 
neural system. 
The brain is a vastly complicated signalling system, with neurons forming 
the basis of that system. It consists of billions of nerve cells, neurons, and 
supporting (neuroglial) cells. Neurons are able to respond to stimuli, such 
as touch, sound, light, conduct impulses, and communicate with each 
other, and with other types of cells like muscle cells. 
 
Fig.1: Neuron structure table
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Electrochemical signals flow in one direction only in neurons, originating at 
the dendrites or cell body (usually in response to stimulation from other 
neurons) and propagating along axon branches which terminate on the 
dendrites or cell bodies of perhaps thousands of other neurons. The 
                                                           
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http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/301notes2.htm
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connections between the ends of axons and the dendrites or cell bodies of 
other neurons are specialized structures called synapses. 
 
Fig.2: Synapse table
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Synapse is the point of communication between two neurons or between a 
neuron and a target cell, like a muscle or a gland. 
A single axon can have multiple branches, allowing it to make synapses 
on various postsynaptic cells. Similarly, a single neuron can receive 
thousands of synaptic inputs from many different sending neurons. 
Synaptic transmission can be either electrical or chemical. In some cases, 
both at the same synapse. Electrical synapses transmit signals more 
rapidly than chemical synapses do. Whether chemical synapses are more 
flexible than electrical ones.  
Neurons coordinate the functioning of organs and behaviours. To 
discharge this function, neurons work in cell groups. Each group has a 
specific function and the assemblage can be genetic (like the ability to 
distinguish linguistic sounds from environmental noises) or linked with 
environmental factors (like fluently speaking two languages because of the 
daily exposure to both of them). This distinction, between a genetically and 
an environmentally determined nervous system, is fundamental 
(Munakata, Casey, Diamond, 2004). 
This also occurs when someone learns how to speak any language, 
including his or her mother tongue. Learning a language depends on both 
                                                           
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https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/neuron-nervous-system/a/the-
synapse