Helping children confidently practice English through songs and chants

 I - INTRODUCTION
1. The reasons of choosing topic 
The goal of education is to train people develop a comprehensive and humane response to meet the technical requirements of the country today . In which language is considered to be a powerful and effective tool in the process of integration and development with other countries in the world . English is an international language , so the Party and State are particularly interested in the national foreign language project of the government until 2020 with the common goal: " Comprehensive renovation of the teaching and learning of foreign languages ​​in the national education system ... " In which elementary students have to listen, understand, speak, read and write simple instructions on topics that are related to themselves and their school. Primary English now also attaches great importance and interest. Teaching English from small steps will help the children have a good start for the long journey later. However, the children's language learning is completely different from adults, they are very playful, not respected to academic tasks. To help students acquire good basic knowledge of elementary English program, toward active learning activities, against passive learning habits, creating a solid foundation of knowledge for children. The teacher has to know how to inspire them learning by "Helping children confidently practice English through songs and chants". 
   2.The purpose of study:
 As a teacher of English at primary school, I myself constantly research and innovate teaching methods. Hopefully this topic will contribute to reduce the difficulties and obstacles, as well as be small contribution to improving the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning English in primary schools.
3. The object of study:The fifth form students of Dong Tien B Primary School
4. The methods of study: To research a topic, people often choose many different methods. With this topic, I use the following methods: 
1 / Theoretical research method : I read the conducting material issues related to my research needs. 
2/ Learning experience from my colleagues :Attend the colleagues’ lessons to follow their good method. 
3/ Experimental matching method. 
4/ Observation method.
II - THE CONTENT
1. Theoretical basic:
The views of the Party is to improve foreign language skills for the majority of the young generation of the country, and propose innovative solutions to address the pressing issues faced in the rapidly improving language resources for students. So far English is considered as a subject to be focused and get a lot of attention at the primary level. To meet the requirements of national renewal, each teacher must have completed myself teaching career. To do well the teaching and learning of foreign languages ​​in elementary school , the teachers must understand clearly the children’s psychology in elementary school as well as their characteristics and abilities when learning language:
 + Children are very active so that they can not afford to sit obediently and listen to the teacher's lecture. 
+ In addition, children do not have the ability to concentrate for a long time about 5-10 minutes to think and acquire knowledge. So in the foreign language classroom, children have been involved in many different learning activities.
+ Children need the repetitive elements. I know that children absorb and imitate very fast but forget very quick, too. Therefore, materials must be practised as much as possible. In English classes, the teacher should create opportunities for the children to further practice through physical exercise (listen and repeat), replaced exercise. To meet the specific characteristics of children in the process of learning a foreign language, we have used the techniques and forms of communicative exercises to facilitate formation of a language learning environment. Also in these environments where students are exposed more. Using visual items for children to be exposed to English native speakers through audio / DVD. Students become active elements of lectures.
+ Children learn through listening, watching, imitating. Children acquire knowledge in a completely different way from adults. Adults acquire knowledge in a sense, analysis, young acquire naturally through intuition. So what exercises to strengthen the observation of children through the audio-visual and mechanical imitation as well as modeling activities of teachers to introduce the new materials must ensure the accuracy of the language, especially pronunciation.
+ The ability of children are curious, energetic and creative in a very natural way. Children always need to explore their surroundings and interact with people, so that children establish an understanding of the world children live.
+ Children would love to communicate. When we monitor children talk, we'll all enjoy the talk, though not as something important. When we meet the children who we do not know, through the first minute they might be shy, but after a few questions of our encouragement, they will tell us about their selves, their parents, interests, including saying bad things that their friends do, and would love to ask questions back.
With the above characteristics, we can see that, in order to help them get a better ability to practice languages well, we need to have a reasonable solution. We can not teach children like to teach an adult. This shows that the teacher must have a high technical level to enter the world of young children to eventually lead to new concepts, to a deeper understanding of concepts that children initially approached. Children learn language depends heavily on incentives. This totally depends on the style of the teacher. If teachers encourage young children to create a good learning environment, children will learn a lot faster. In many teaching methods to promote positive child, there are two methods which are consistent and favorite for all ages are songs and chants. There are many English songs for children but there are not many chants. Consequently, the teacher must know how to combine the use of all available ones and promote their abilities in self-composing songs and chants so that all class hours achieve the highest efficiency.
2. The current situation:
Through practical teaching in Dong Tien B primary school I see, there are some advantages following:
Administrators are very interested in foreign language teaching. The school has two good teachers of English who always try to self-learn, self- upgrade their skills, create and know how to apply the information technology in teaching, innovate teaching methods appropriate for each kind of students in order to help them quickly understand the lesson. Those are teachers who love the teaching job, the kids and who are enthusiastic and responsible in the work, ready to complete all assigned tasks.
During the past school years, English teachers’ group ensures the quality of teaching and learning, ends the situation of letting students be in the class which is not appropriate with their language ability. There are no longer students dropping out and especially, the school has gifted students who have achieved the high ranks in the exams for excellent students in Dong Son district.
On the other hand, it also has a certain number of difficulties:
+ There is a number of hard students who are the children of the poor families or the families in which the parents are divorced...Therefore, the education of the children in these families are little cared for, which affects the children’s learning outcomes.
 + A lot of parents do not know English, therefore, it is impossible for them to help their children to learn English.
+ Some children have psychology of being shy when speaking in the public.
+ Because of circumstances, many children do not focus on learning foreign language, they learn how to cope and some are bored with studying English.
+ They don’t speak English fluently because of no regular use.
*The survey results in early school year of class 5B Dong Tien B Primary school
Class
Total
 Quality
Excellent
Percent
Good
Percent
Average
Percent
Weak
Percent
5B
30
4
13%
9
30%
15
50%
2
7%
So how to help the teaching and learning English achieve high efficiency? Through teaching and research so I boldly launched "A number of measures to help the fifth form students confidently practise English through songs and chants."
3. Solutions and implementation:
Through practical teaching in Dong Tien B primary schools I have researched and used the following measures to help students improve their language learning in primary schools better:
3.1 Studying the textbooks:
The purpose of this method is to help the teachers master the English program of grade 3,4,5 to find the most appropriate method for each particular lesson. 
Currently the school is using the book Let's go of Oxford publisher for grades 5. Through the book I find that the form of this book is suitable for primary school age: pictures are colorful and vivid, the characters are fun and accompany them from the first lesson for the rest of the books, give them the curiosity through each lesson, help them see the characters as their friends. In terms of the content of this book revolves around the topic, the topic is very friendly, close to the lives of the children. Each topic focuses on phonics, vocabulary and grammar with very short sentence patterns consistent with age. The structure of all these books meets the aesthetic and content for elementary school children. As we know, to study well, students need to have a good set of books and teachers have to know how to use the method correctly and flexibly to transmit knowledge to the children. On the other hand, due to the requirements of society and the demands of educational strategies, each teacher must improve teaching skills that are suitable with school age. It means that when teaching in the classroom we must take into account that: 
+ Children do not have the ability to understand the rules of grammar, do not understand the explanation of rules of language. Such rules on the use of the verbs. [1]
If we explain that: the present simple used to express repeated daily action, habits ... it is too abstract, children do not have the ability to imagine the content of rules to understand, as well as remember sample sentences and grammatical rules, so they just learn the prefabricated phrases without being analyzed how to form these sentences. 
+ Children have the ability to imitate very quickly what adults do so when learning new things they will absorb very fast but also be easy to forget.
+ Children enjoyed singing and dancing as they enjoyed participating in activities not like to sit silently long. 
So the teacher in the classroom is only the instructor, the students’ role as a positive factor, they voluntarily participate in activities that teacher provides in a natural way, these activities are songs and chants. In the program Let's go, the songs also appear in units of lessons with a less frequency, because each unit of the Let's go is very long so each semester students only learn two units so there are not many chants and songs. However, in order to make students love songs and chants in English lessons, the teacher has to master how to teach songs and chants, help students learn in the most effective way and create excitement for the English language. So I boldly launch "A number of measures to help the fifth form students confidently practise English through songs and chants" to help children practice well the skills as well as use new words and modal sentences exactly and smoothly. 
3.2/ Methods of teaching songs and chants for primary students [3]
The purpose of these methods is to create excitement for students, create a change in class activities, review the vocabulary and sentences, help students practice the pronunciation, intonation, stressBesides, they are used to switch to a new or familiar topic, Specifically as follows:
a. Songs:[2]
	Most of children, especially the primary students like singing very much. Through the study of teaching songs as a kind of lively and attractive exercises in order to teach children how to learn foreign languages. I can give the benefits of teaching songs in a foreign language class. 
+ Help students improve memory , concentration, association .
+ Help bring motivation for them .
+ Help students relax after the stressful study .
+ Help the children get along with other students in the class ​​.
+ Change the status of a classroom effectively, help the English lessons more interesting, balance energy level in the class.
+ Especially, help students review as well as practice the materials such as vocabularies, modal sentences, pronunciation and intonation effectively. Sometimes songs are used to teach new materials.They are really sticky, make children remember material very well. 
However, in order to teach a song successfully, the teacher has to master the basic steps to teach it:
* The process of teaching a song:[3]
+ Review or introduce the main structure in the song using pictures/ objects when possible.
 + Play the recording, let children hear the whole song once . This step helps them have a chance to access the melody of songs , create emotion and curiosity for this tune . This is also a step which creates excitement for the children so that they are ready to take part in.
+ Let children read the lyrics line by line. At this time, children have to pronounce exactly the lyrics. They have to particularly pay attention to the sound of wind because Vietnamese also have negative wind but its position is not the same in English .
For example, the sound of wind in English appear a lot at the end of many words such as : Piece / pi : s / , wish / wi∫ / and wind sounds in English is difficult to pronounce, especially when they stand at the end such as: “chair / t∫eə /, watch / w ס t∫ / , village / vilid / . Students often miss the sound when singing. This makes our Vietnamese be turned , lack of tonal English .
+ When reading vocabulary, we need drill the children to read the stress properly ('apple, 'every, 'beautiful) because in English songs, the word stress is very important. However, the sentence stress doesn’t take any important roles because it is dominated by songs. When training them to read the lyrics we should pay attention to interrupt as the way the song breaks, do not interrupt as the grammartical request. In this way, the children will be able to acsess the rythym easily.
For example: In the song “ Where’s Melisa?...” the following sentence is interrupted as the rythym below:
Where’s Melisa?....
I want to see..... Melissa every day.
So when practising the children to read, the teacher should teach them to interrupt in this way so that they can sing the song in the correct rythym.
In the process of teaching children to read, the teacher should explain to children the meaning, content of the song. However the teacher only explains the common sense without teaching each sample sentences appearing in the song. We still provide for them corpus in principle as they are prefabricated units. 
For example: When teaching the song “The little purple sneakers” we only teach them know the numbers from 1 to 10 and know how to use them to count the sneakers but we do not teach “little” as an adjective to describe small sneakers:
1 little, 2 little, 3 little sneakers
4 little, 5 little, 6 little sneakers
7 little, 8 little, 9 little sneakers
ittle purple neakers.....
(trích The Purple Sneaker Songs)
+ Let children sing each verse, teacher composes the movements fit the lyrics. This step children often imitate fast melody and lyrics. Teachers can use CD or DVD,get the children repeat each sentence. The reason for this requirement is that the songs in the disk are sung by British, American children. The intervention of the teacher's voice isn’t often as positively effective as the young native voices. 
+ Open tapes for children to sing along and make movements. When children have grasped the whole ways to sing each verse, children need to be connected to sing the complete song. Again CD / DVD gives opportunities for children to adjust the sound and rythym 
+ Have children sing in groups, combining both singing and making movements.
+ Call on some students to perform before the class.
After finishing teaching a song, the children will be very excited and the lessons also become more interesting. By the way teaching English through songs will be easier for the teacher to teach as well as for children to study. These songs are often used in less controlled practice / Production, warm up or checking the previous lessons. Along with songs, chants also play an important role in practising children new words, modal sentences, intonation and stress. 
B. Chants:[5]
A chant is simply vocabulary spoken over a background of music or rhythm. They are useful because something about the music energizes the students, and they have to pronounce the word in a rhythm. I found that a chant is a lot easier to teach than a song. However, I also use chants often in my regular weekly classes. Also, if you are not comfortable with singing in front of your students, chants are useful. 
In the process of learning a foreign language, we have used the nature of this type of chant to train the students ability to speak English correctly with the sentence stress and sentence rhythm as well as remind students the grammar that they were learned as sample sentences, vocabulary... Teach students the language functions such as explanation, asking for information, developing listening and speaking skills, creating a fun atmosphere in the classroom appealing to help students learn to speak a foreign language easier. The chants are all constructed on the basis of common everyday words, not poetry. Rhythm, stress and intonation of the chant is a version of a natural language, a word of those who have studied in. For example, when we read “Hi, how are you? Fine, How are you? (chant) our reading must be the same as the words saying in the society, although it echoes the rhythm of poetry. Chant for foreign language classes often serve the purpose of teaching, grammar (sample sentence), pronunciation (stress, rhythm sentence, consonant - vowel sounds). We call these kinds of chants asVocabulary, Grammar chants or Phonics chants.To help the students study well, the teachers must master the process of teaching a chant:
* The process of teaching a chant:[5]
- Have students listen to the teacher read the form once, the teacher says while clapping to the beat all. Have students read new words. Teachers explain the meaning of new words using pictures and illustrative movements without translation into Vietnamese. Speaking content chant, teachers just explain to children of all common sense chant, through images, gestures, situations. Not taught phrases appear in all chants. We offer corpus for children in principle as they are prefabricated units. 
- Teaching reading the post chants. Teachers copied chants on the board then marked * or underlined sentence stress for students to read properly. Read each statement of post chant and clap in accordance with the accent and rhythm of each sentence. Note repeatedly until drill their students to memorize. Teach student the movement in post chant. 
- Divide the class into two groups. A group repeats each sentence of the chant while other claps their hands in the correct rythym of the chant then switch roles to do the steps above.
- Call a student reread chants.
- The class read the chant again to review the entire phonics of the chant
* For example : Teaching a chant to practice the phrases and words in the Let's learn - let's go 4 unit 2A (Grade 5)
+ Teacher shows some pictures and posts or writes the chant on