Game-Based TPR Vocabulary Programme Without a Shared Language in Indonesia

Abstract

Most game-based language teaching research assumes that the teacher and learners share at least one common language. This assumption shapes how interventions are designed and leaves a gap when it does not hold. This practitioner reflection examines that assumption through a one-month English vocabulary programme at the Speak and Speak English Training Centre in Temanggung, Central Java, Indonesia, with 25 students aged 3.5 to 13. Students came from a trilingual context where Javanese was the home language, Bahasa Indonesia the language of schooling, and English an additional language with minimal classroom exposure. The students and teacher shared no common language at all. The programme drew on Total Physical Response, embodied cognition, and game-based learning, and used no reading, writing, or homework. This paper distinguishes between two categories of activity: games, defined as rule-governed activities with a competitive goal and immediate visible feedback tied to vocabulary performance, and playful instructional routines, which are structured physical activities without competitive orientation. Building on this distinction, vocabulary was developed through games including dog and bone, musical chairs, hopscotch, find the noun, and colour identification, alongside playful routines such as call-and-response and embodied action pairing. All meaning was conveyed through gesture, demonstration, and physical modelling, with no spoken instruction in a shared language at any point. Outcomes were assessed using flashcard-based tasks. Students viewed an image and produced the English word orally to test receptive knowledge, or viewed a written word and performed the corresponding physical action to test productive knowledge. From a baseline at which most students could not produce common greetings without prompting, students demonstrated consistent use of approximately 120 words by the end of the programme. Notably, only five of the twenty-two activities in the framework qualify as games by the criteria defined above; the remaining activities are playful instructional routines that provided the input and modelling on which the games depended. The findings suggest that shared language is not a precondition for effective game-based vocabulary instruction. The paper offers a low-resource, replicable activity framework for practitioners working in multilingual, no-shared-language contexts.