Vietnamese students usually feel bored in vocabulary lessons and theythink of learning a list of new words with meanings in their language without any realcontext practice. Working this way, after a short period of time, students may find out thatthis does not satisfy them. With the aim to investigate into the students’motivation, a studywas conducted focusing on finding out the motivation of the 10th form students at PhanDang Luu High School when learning vocabulary in the pre-stages of a skills lesson withthe use of language games. Asimple questionnaire survey was used to get the information.The main findings showed that the students’motivation was not very high. More attentionneeds to be paid to the choice and organization of games in order to help increase theirmotivation in learning vocabulary when using games. The findings would be useful to theteachers of English concerned.