Chapter two: literature review
2.1 Teaching songs and games in a foreign language
context
It is not a fallacy to assert that songs and games are one of
the most charming and ethnically prosperous resources that the teachers of the
fourth form can easily use in verbal communication classrooms. Songs propose a
change from habitual classroom actions. They are valuable resources to expand
students' abilities in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They can also
be exercises to teach a variety of language matters such as sentence patterns,
vocabulary, pronunciation, rhythm, adjectives, and adverbs.
Learning English in the course of songs also affords a
non-threatening ambiance for students, who usually are tense when speaking
English in an official classroom location. Songs also give new insights into
the objective traditions. According to Wilgo M Rivers (1987) they are the means
in the course of which educational topics are presented successfully.
While they supply genuine texts, they are inspiring. Prosodic
features of the language such as stress, rhythm, intonation are presented
through songs, thus from side to side using them the language, which is cut up
into sequences of structural points, becomes an entire once more. There are
many advantages of using songs in the classroom. Through using modern trendy
songs, which youngsters well know, the teacher of the fourth form can meet the
challenges of the students needs in the classroom. Because songs are extremely
unforgettable and motivating, in many forms they may comprise an influential
subculture with their own rituals. Furthermore, through using customary folk
songs the support of the learners' knowledge of the target culture can be
broadened. Appropriately, chosen traditional folk songs have the twofold
encouraging assault of beautiful tunes and appealing stories, in addition for
many students- the added component of originality. Most songs, especially folk
songs, go after a frequently repetitive verse form, with rhyme, and have a
series of other discourse features, which make them easy to follow. In
consequence, if preferred appropriately and adopted cautiously, a teacher
should benefit from songs in all phases of teaching grammar.
Songs may both be used for the presentation or the perform
phase of the grammar class. They may support widespread and concentrated
listening, and inspire resourcefulness and use of imagination in an undisturbed
classroom ambiance. Whereas selecting a song the teacher should take the age,
interests of the learners and the language being used in the song into
deliberation. To improve the fourth form students' commitment, it is also
advantageous to allow learners to take part in the selection of the songs. The
latest concern of the foreign language teachers is to make the students use the
language communicatively. After the realization of communicative competence,
activities, or techniques that are task-oriented and that guide students to use
the language imaginatively have gained significance. Games and problem-solving
activities, which are task-based and have a purpose beyond the production of
accurate speech, are the examples of the most preferable communicative
activities. Such activities highlight not only the competence but also the
performance of the learner. Nonetheless, they are the indispensable parts of a
grammar lesson, since they reinforce a form-discourse match. In such
activities, the attention is on the discourse context. Both games and
problem-solving activities have a purpose.
Games are organized according to rules, and they are
enjoyable. Most games require choral responses or group works, whereas
problem-solving activities (though they are structured) require individual
response and creative solutions. Games and problem-solving activities are
generally used after the presentation, in the practice part, because such
communicative tasks can only be handled after mastering sufficient grammar and
lexical points. Through well-planned games, learners can put into practice and
internalize vocabulary, grammar, and structures extensively. Play and
competition that are provided by games enhance the motivation of the young
learners. They also reduce the stress in the classroom as Krasen S.D (1988)
suggested. At the same time as playing games, the learners' attention is on the
message, not on the language. For teachers, using the game-based platform in
class is sometimes a real challenge. In the 5th form class, pupils are
understood by teachers to be working on learning the language, but they are
also to some extent understood to be exercising their out of school identities
as players and gamers while interacting with the platform, and thereby bringing
unsolicited and unwanted entertainment into the classroom. On the one hand so
many teachers in the fourth form acknowledge that gaming, including the Pacman
activity could facilitate vocabulary acquisition and spelling, on the other
hand the role of the teacher is often to slow down the pace of playing and
interacting and to encourage pupils to concentrate, repeat and persist. Often
teachers would insist, when they are guiding or supervising individual pupils,
that pupils should engage in introductions to tasks and other kinds of
preparatory work that students were more likely to skip in order to move on to
`real' task interaction. In this sense teachers were trying to reconceptualise
gaming as a profound or `serious' learning activity based on concentration and
perseverance, in which a linear process of solving and understanding tasks
should generally be observed.
In the 4th form classroom gaming is from the beginning
conceptualised as a learning activity by the teacher which allow the students
to understand gaming as a teacher controlled activity from the outset. In the
4th form class where the teacher has pre-selected the tasks, pupils are much
more likely to work through the tasks and to do this in the order suggested by
the teacher, though a number of the students also choose to do the tasks in the
order that seem interesting to them. The attention span of these students is
generally longer than that of the 5th formers, also their pace of learning and
interacting with the platform was much more relaxed than the 5th
formers, who would typically move quickly through the tasks, and often skip
from the platform menu to individual tasks as described above. Whereas it may
be argued that these differences in attention span and platform response could
be due to age differences, 4th formers are also observed to prefer the most
playful tasks and to have little patience with tasks that were too `bookish'.
In addition to this, some 4th formers would do `entertaining' tasks (for
instance the Pacman task) that they were not asked to do, in these cases the
teacher said that they we allow to work on tasks of their own choice when they
had finished what they had been asked to do. Gaming in this sense often worked
as a reward after `learning'. Research, Reflections and Innovations in
Integrating ICT in Education
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