Those Who Play Don‘t Cause Trouble. But What Do They Learn?

Abstract

Motivation and activation of pupils are among the important factors in the teacher‘s preparation for instruction. One of the ways to activate pupils and make the instruction more eff ective is to use the didactic game. However, the teacher must proceed in the same way as in the choice of any method, i.e. consider about the integrity of method, content and aim.

Th e aim of this paper is to present the results of the analysis of five materials, which are described by their authors as didactic games and which are to be used mainly for entertaining practice. The aim of the analysis was to evaluate the quality and applicability of these materials in Czech language teaching. First, the paper introduces the didactic game as a means of increasing pupil motivation. The main part of the paper is then focused on the analysis, which was carried out on the basis of fi ve defi ned aspects: aims, content, cognitive aspect, didactic aspect and linguistic aspect. The results show that the games do not correspond to the aims of the subject of Czech language, the content is in all cases transformed into the form of small linguistics, the cognitive demandingness of the content is not sufficiently refl ected and at the same time some practical aspects complicate the acquisition of knowledge and skills, especially the decontextualization of examples. In all the games there are wrong formulations and mistakes that are contrary to linguistic knowledge. The fundamental problem with these materials lies in the lack of reflection on the content, as their only function is simply to intesify the experience of instruction.