The Positive Role of Songs In English

Teaching

作者：姜加芹

来源：《学园》2013年第06期

Ⅰ Brief introduction of the positive role of songs in English teaching

Interest is the best teacher for English language learners. How to arouse the students great interest in English class is due to the teacher s teaching techniques. Constant use of techniques throughout the lesson can assist and support students understanding teaching materials. However, studies have indicated that, in most classrooms, teachers come to teach with ideas about the teaching/learning process formed from the years they have spent as students themselves, leaving students severely limited in terms of opportunities to use language in a variety of way. Most of the traditional teaching methods pay special attention to the process of teaching knowledge. Teaching techniques and learning strategies are often neglected. In this way, students usually get sensory

memory and short－term memory for learning materials. As is known to all, our senses, such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, register information from the environment and make it available for further processing in short－term memory. An important feature of the sensory memory is that information registers only for a very brief period of time. It is then either lost from the system as forgetting or is a conscious thought in short－term memory. Short－term memory is a very active, immediate memory system, which has two characteristics. What comes to be the first is that information is soon lost from this memory unless it is rehearsed. What s more, short－term memory has limited capacity. Although several ideas can be judged at once, the addition of too many new ideas can result in the loss of them. So, perfect long－term memory is the dream of many students. By becoming clear on where we stand nowadays, we should choose to teach differently from the way we were taught. One of the most widely accepted methods for teaching strategies to English language learners to achieve long－term memory is to apply songs in English class. The ways in which we put songs into practice vary with the situation, the method, the topic, the background of the material, the content and the audience. We will see, as described in the following, songs really play a positive role in English teaching.

Ⅱ Analysis of the positive role of songs in English teaching

To begin with, songs assist students in getting knowledge of international phonetics. As we all know, it s easy for even a little child to learn to sing “A B C Song” easily and quickly. However, if a child is asked to recite the twenty－six letters one by one, he will feel it dull and uninteresting and eventually give up. Yet things will be quite different when he is required to focus on learning “A B C Song”. It will be much easier to learn the letters by providing a song, which tells us one important theory…Different goals result in different effects. As is the same with international phonetics, for most English language learners, they are unwilling to learn the international phonetics just by dull reading and repeated writing. Even if they have to remember them in class, they can only have short－term memory for them while songs can help them gain long－term memory for the phonetics. For