The applicability of sports imagery in teaching badminton in PE lessons for secondary students

The applicability of sports imagery for learning badminton was investigated in Form.5 PE lesson. In this research design, two classed were being selected - one for experimental group and other for control group. Students’ sports ability was classified as either high (IH) or low (IL) using a questionnaire. Skill tests of badminton forehand high clear were tested before and after the teaching period.
During the teaching period, sports imagery was used for the experimental group and conventional teaching was used for the control group. The data were analyzed to study the effects of group and sports imagery ability on students’ performance. The result showed that hitting accuracy was significantly affected by sports imagery ability for both the IH and IL students. Better improvement in swing posture was found for IL students using sports imagery training that that of the conventional teaching. For the other performance, the two teaching methods got similar improvement.
In general, sports imagery was found to be a better tool for teaching badminton compared with the conventional teaching, especially for improving hitting accuracy and swinging posture for IL students. Teachers are worth to apply it in PE lesson to teaching badminton.