A number of measures to help the fifth form students of dong tien b primary school confidently practise english through songs and chants

The teacher has to know how to inspire them learning by "Helpingchildren confidently practice English through songs and chants".. In many teaching methods to promote positive child, ther

I - INTRODUCTION

1 The reasons of choosing topic

The goal of education is to train people develop a comprehensive andhumane response to meet the technical requirements of the country today Inwhich 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 aninternational language , so the Party and State are particularly interested in thenational foreign language project of the government until 2020 with thecommon goal: " Comprehensive renovation of the teaching and learning offoreign languages in the national education system " In which elementarystudents have to listen, understand, speak, read and write simple instructions ontopics that are related to themselves and their school Primary English now alsoattaches great importance and interest Teaching English from small steps willhelp the children have a good start for the long journey later However, thechildren's language learning is completely different from adults, they are veryplayful, not respected to academic tasks To help students acquire good basicknowledge of elementary English program, toward active learning activities,against passive learning habits, creating a solid foundation of knowledge forchildren The teacher has to know how to inspire them learning by "Helpingchildren confidently practice English through songs and chants"

2.The purpose of study:

As a teacher of English at primary school, I myself constantly researchand innovate teaching methods Hopefully this topic will contribute to reduce thedifficulties and obstacles, as well as be small contribution to improving thequality 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 issuesrelated 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 themajority of the young generation of the country, and propose innovativesolutions to address the pressing issues faced in the rapidly improving languageresources for students So far English is considered as a subject to be focusedand get a lot of attention at the primary level To meet the requirements ofnational renewal, each teacher must have completed myself teaching career To

do well the teaching and learning of foreign languages in elementary school , theteachers 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 timeabout 5-10 minutes to think and acquire knowledge So in the foreign languageclassroom, children have been involved in many different learning activities.+ Children need the repetitive elements I know that children absorb and imitatevery fast but forget very quick, too Therefore, materials must be practised asmuch as possible In English classes, the teacher should create opportunities forthe 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 ofcommunicative exercises to facilitate formation of a language learningenvironment Also in these environments where students are exposed more.Using visual items for children to be exposed to English native speakers throughaudio / DVD Students become active elements of lectures

+ Children learn through listening, watching, imitating Children acquireknowledge 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 andmechanical imitation as well as modeling activities of teachers to introduce thenew materials must ensure the accuracy of the language, especiallypronunciation

+ The ability of children are curious, energetic and creative in a very naturalway Children always need to explore their surroundings and interact withpeople, so that children establish an understanding of the world children live.+ Children would love to communicate When we monitor children talk, we'llall enjoy the talk, though not as something important When we meet thechildren 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, andwould love to ask questions back.

With the above characteristics, we can see that, in order to help them get abetter 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 teachermust have a high technical level to enter the world of young children toeventually lead to new concepts, to a deeper understanding of concepts thatchildren initially approached Children learn language depends heavily onincentives This totally depends on the style of the teacher If teachers encourageyoung children to create a good learning environment, children will learn a lotfaster In many teaching methods to promote positive child, there are twomethods 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 availableones and promote their abilities in self-composing songs and chants so that allclass hours achieve the highest efficiency

2 The current situation:

Through practical teaching in Dong Tien B primary school I see, there aresome advantages following:

Administrators are very interested in foreign language teaching The schoolhas two good teachers of English who always try to self-learn, self- upgradetheir skills, create and know how to apply the information technology inteaching, innovate teaching methods appropriate for each kind of students inorder to help them quickly understand the lesson Those are teachers who lovethe 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 ofteaching and learning, ends the situation of letting students be in the class which

is not appropriate with their language ability There are no longer studentsdropping out and especially, the school has gifted students who have achievedthe 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 ofthe children in these families are little cared for, which affects the children’slearning outcomes

+ A lot of parents do not know English, therefore, it is impossible for them tohelp 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 foreignlanguage, 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

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 haveresearched and used the following measures to help students improve theirlanguage learning in primary schools better:

3.1 Studying the textbooks:

The purpose of this method is to help the teachers master the English program ofgrade 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 forgrades 5 Through the book I find that the form of this book is suitable forprimary school age: pictures are colorful and vivid, the characters are fun andaccompany them from the first lesson for the rest of the books, give them thecuriosity through each lesson, help them see the characters as their friends Interms of the content of this book revolves around the topic, the topic is veryfriendly, 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 elementaryschool children As we know, to study well, students need to have a good set ofbooks and teachers have to know how to use the method correctly and flexibly totransmit knowledge to the children On the other hand, due to the requirements

of society and the demands of educational strategies, each teacher must improveteaching skills that are suitable with school age It means that when teaching inthe classroom we must take into account that:

+ Children do not have the ability to understand the rules of grammar, donot understand the explanation of rules of language Such rules on the use of theverbs [1]

If we explain that: the present simple used to express repeated dailyaction, habits it is too abstract, children do not have the ability to imagine thecontent of rules to understand, as well as remember sample sentences andgrammatical rules, so they just learn the prefabricated phrases without beinganalyzed how to form these sentences

+ Children have the ability to imitate very quickly what adults do so whenlearning new things they will absorb very fast but also be easy to forget

+ Children enjoyed singing and dancing as they enjoyed participating inactivities 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 sothere are not many chants and songs However, in order to make students lovesongs and chants in English lessons, the teacher has to master how to teachsongs 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 achange in class activities, review the vocabulary and sentences, help studentspractice the pronunciation, intonation, stress…Besides, 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 verymuch Through the study of teaching songs as a kind of lively and attractiveexercises 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 Englishlessons more interesting, balance energy level in the class.

+ Especially, help students review as well as practice the materials such asvocabularies, modal sentences, pronunciation and intonation effectively.Sometimes songs are used to teach new materials.They are really sticky, makechildren remember material very well

However, in order to teach a song successfully, the teacher has to masterthe basic steps to teach it:

* The process of teaching a song:[3]

+ Review or introduce the main structure in the song using pictures/ objectswhen possible

+ Play the recording, let children hear the whole song once This step helpsthem have a chance to access the melody of songs , create emotion and curiosityfor this tune This is also a step which creates excitement for the children sothat they are ready to take part in

+ Let children read the lyrics line by line At this time, children have topronounce 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 thesame in English

For example, the sound of wind in English appear a lot at the end of manywords such as : Piece / pi : s / , wish / wi∫ / and wind sounds in English isdifficult 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 whensinging This makes our Vietnamese be turned , lack of tonal English

+ When reading vocabulary, we need drill the children to read the stressproperly ('apple, 'every, 'beautiful) because in English songs, the word stress isvery important However, the sentence stress doesn’t take any important rolesbecause it is dominated by songs When training them to read the lyrics weshould pay attention to interrupt as the way the song breaks, do not interrupt asthe grammartical request In this way, the children will be able to acsess therythym easily

For example: In the song “ Where’s Melisa? ” the following sentence isinterrupted 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 tointerrupt 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 tochildren the meaning, content of the song However the teacher only explains thecommon 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 teachthem know the numbers from 1 to 10 and know how to use them to count thesneakers 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

10 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 orDVD,get the children repeat each sentence The reason for this requirement isthat the songs in the disk are sung by British, American children Theintervention of the teacher's voice isn’t often as positively effective as the youngnative voices

+ Open tapes for children to sing along and make movements When childrenhave 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 toadjust 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 thelessons also become more interesting By the way teaching English throughsongs 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 orchecking the previous lessons Along with songs, chants also play an importantrole in practising children new words, modal sentences, intonation and stress

B Chants:[5]

A chant is simply vocabulary spoken over a background of music orrhythm They are useful because something about the music energizes thestudents, 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 myregular weekly classes Also, if you are not comfortable with singing in front ofyour students, chants are useful

In the process of learning a foreign language, we have used the nature ofthis type of chant to train the students ability to speak English correctly with thesentence stress and sentence rhythm as well as remind students the grammar thatthey were learned as sample sentences, vocabulary Teach students thelanguage functions such as explanation, asking for information, developinglistening and speaking skills, creating a fun atmosphere in the classroom

appealing to help students learn to speak a foreign language easier The chantsare 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 ofthose 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 thesociety, although it echoes the rhythm of poetry Chant for foreign languageclasses often serve the purpose of teaching, grammar (sample sentence),pronunciation (stress, rhythm sentence, consonant - vowel sounds) We call thesekinds of chants asVocabulary, Grammar chants or Phonics chants.To help thestudents 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 whileclapping to the beat all Have students read new words Teachers explain themeaning of new words using pictures and illustrative movements withouttranslation into Vietnamese Speaking content chant, teachers just explain tochildren of all common sense chant, through images, gestures, situations Nottaught phrases appear in all chants We offer corpus for children in principle asthey are prefabricated units

- Teaching reading the post chants Teachers copied chants on the board thenmarked * or underlined sentence stress for students to read properly Read eachstatement of post chant and clap in accordance with the accent and rhythm ofeach sentence Note repeatedly until drill their students to memorize Teachstudent the movement in post chant

- Divide the class into two groups A group repeats each sentence of the chantwhile 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 the board:

Look at him

He can swim Look at Nick

He can use chopsticks Look at me

I can climb a tree

+ Listen though: Let students listen to the teacher reading the chant a few times

to create the impression of rhythm

+ Teaching the meaning: Explain the main ideal of the whole chant, not translate

each sentence For example: This chant tells us what Nam can do He can swim;

and what you Nick? He can use chopsticks And what about you? A friend saidthat he could climb a tree

+ Read and beat: Let students read each sentence in the rythym, read whileclapping or tapping beat by beating hands down on the table :

- Look (clap) at him (clap)

- He (clap) can swim (clap)

- Look (clap) at Nick (clap)

- He (clap) can use (clap) chopsticks (clap)

- Look (clap) at me (clap)

- I (clap) can climb (clap) a tree (clap)

The rhythm falls on the accented syllable, bold letters Teacher helpsstudents read and reread many times until memorized

+ Drama: Call a group of 3 students to the board: S1 takes the role of the boy;S2 takes the role of Nick; S3 plays the role "Me" The whole class read thechant while clapping their hands Three Ss in turn do movements

- The whole class clap their hands and point to the boy: Look (clap) at him (clap) He (clap) can swim (clap)

 The boy makes the gestures of swimming

- The whole class clap their hands and point to Nick:

- Look (clap) at Nick (clap) He (clap) can use (clap) chopsticks (clap)

 Nick makes the gestures of using the chopsticks

- The class sit silently The student who plays "Me" reads while makinggestures: “Look at me”then points at his chest and reads “ I can climb atree” at the same time making gestures to climb a tree

- These are steps of teaching a chant to change the class atmosphereeffectively.They are very confident to read chants and chants help themread better in English intonation

*Here are pictures of the students who are reading chants:

By teaching the songs and chants, the teacher helps students really enjoyparticipating in performances, reading-speaking English However, in the bookLet’s go there are not many songs because each unit has only one song whilethere are 4 units in each book it means that Ss only study 4 songs per semester(for the fifth form) and there is no chant Therefore, we should have the bestsolution that is improving the ability of composing songs and chants byourselves

3.3/ Composing and guiding students to compose songs and chants:

A Songs:[6]

In the book Let's go there is only one song per each unit and there are notany chants so the teachers always have to look for songs and chants matchingthe theme of the lesson But there are too many English songs so sometimes itseems difficult for the teachers to find a suitable song for their class Theappropriate requires here involve many aspects: suitable for ages, suitable for thetopics that they learning, suitable for to the ability to acquire, and suitable forchildren’s understanding Sometimes we find a good song which is suitablewith the theme but its rythym is very difficult for the children to imitate

*For example : The song “Rock my soul”

I’m in the bosom of Abraham Oh, rock my soul.

I’m safe in the shadow of the towering man Oh, rock my soul His bosom is dark and deep and wide Oh, rock my soul

And I can feel the light shining from inside Oh, rock my soul.

Or the song below is not suitable for Vietnamese culture, so it’s difficult for thechildren to understand its content

Little Jack Horner

Sat in a corner, Eating his Christmas pie:

He put his thumb,

And pulled our a plum, And said: “What a good boy am I?”

Sometimes finding the song but its content is too familiar so it does not inspirethe children For example:

The ABC song

ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRSTUVW XYZ oh well you see!

Now I know the ABC

To solve the above proble, the teacher must know how to compose a song at therequest of her However, it’s impossible for teachers to compose the rythym ofthe songs because they are not musicians and do not understand the basic music

So teachers can use the melody of the songs that are familiar with the children,

or the songs are taken from English books for primary students or the songs inthe course of their own and then compose the new lysics However, to do these

the songwriting, the teacher needs to master the following steps:[3]

+ Step1: Select the sample songs (with interesting melody but also easy toremember)

+ Step 2: Select the topic, theme matching the content that the teachers areteaching or teachers need to review

+ Step 3: Find words related to the topic chosen for replacement (to do this stepstudents have to find the words that are suitable for both content and number ofsyllables

+ Step 4: Merge the selected words in the lyrics to make a new song as the topicsthat teachers select

* For example: To practice Ss the modal sentence: “What’s the matter?” and

the vocabularies about the topic “ Physical states” in Unit 2 Let’s go 2A (forgrade 5) I have done the following:

+ Step1: Choose the song “Brother John” for model This is an interesting songwith familiar melody