Using Songs to Promote Fun English Learning for Young English Learners: How it works?

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INTRODUCTION

Nowadays English has become an international language, more and more people learn English. The importance of English as a world language has made people to learn English as early as possible. In Indonesia for example, English is taught even before the children enter the playgroup, there is a special class for children who are still around two or three years old. This is supported by the fact that the optimum age for children to learn a foreign language is when they are still in a very young age. This phenomenon has made Teaching English to Young Learners “TEYL” become increasingly famous. There are many English courses and the publication of the course books. Before we go on, it is better to look at the definition of young learners in order for us to have the same perspective and knowledge. “The definition of Young Learners is children between the ages of about 5 years old to 12 years old” as Rixon (1999) cited in Shin (2006), while  the  primary  or  elementary  stages  of  formal  education  before  the  transition  to secondary school. This is why the ages of the young learners could be varied from one country to the others.

Songs have become an important part of human culture and civilization. They are used in many social and cultural occasions and have traditionally used as an educational tool.  Therefore, it is widely believed that songs can be used to promote learning amongst people, including children. 

One type of songs which children like most is action song. This type of songs usually requires body movements of the whole parts of the body or only some parts of it. In relation to English language learning for children, action songs are considered as powerful resources which help their language development. By nature, children enjoy playing and singing songs and they will get a lot of benefits when they were exposed to particular English songs in the English classroom. This paper intends to explain the use of action songs in English classes at elementary schools. At first, it outlines some theoretical reasons of using action songs in the English classroom. Then, it identifies and explains some possible action songs that can be used in the classroom and how to use them in the English classroom.

The reason why the writer chooses this topic is mainly because song is really suitable for young learners. Through songs and the fun activity make the children learn the language unconsciously, and in a fun way. Through songs, the children can enhance their language skills such as listening, speaking and writing. These  three skills are put in order, since the first skills that the children learn is listening the songs, and after that the children learn to speak or sing the song, the last thing, the children learn to write the lyrics of the songs. The activity is not only lead to the fun activity of the children but also the skills’ development of the students when they are listening to the particular kind of song.

DISCUSSION

A. Song as Useful Learning Resources for Young Learners

Songs and languages might have some similar features. By using songs, people can express themselves. Similar to songs, language is also a means used by people to express their thought, feeling or concern about particular things. As Goodger (2010) cited in Nurhayati (2012) mentions that music and language share some common elements. First “physically, both of them made up of sound waves which our ears capture and our brains process into a meaningful, recognizable code.” Language, except the sign language, and songs are firstly captured by ears and then they proceeded by the brains. Second, both of them “communicate emotions and meanings.” In everyday life, they often function as canal for human to express idea, opinion, feeling, emotion, and dream. Third, they both have an “intrinsic phonology namely rhythm and accentuation, key and intonation”. Song is defined as a short piece of music with words to be sung. In language, particularly English certain features like tune, intonation, stress also exist and give impact to meanings. Goodger also mentioned that “the notes in a melody correspond to the phonemes in words; change the order of the notes in a tune and it loses its sense. It is exactly the same for phonemes in words, phrases and sentences.”

Using Educational Social Network in Teaching English for EFL Students

The Current Issues towards the Use of ICT in English Language Teaching:

Using Educational Social Network in Teaching English for EFL Students

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INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, the use of Information and Computer Technology (ICT) is not a new thing anymore to people. People are already getting accustomed to use ICT in their daily life through their gadget and activities. The use of ICT could not be separated from people’s activities especially for students. Almost all students have their own gadgets. They use it for getting new information and knowing what happened outside their environment. They can access the information throughout the internet wherever they are, as long as their gadgets are connected to the internet signal.

Considering those facts above, the writer can say that there are some things appear in students’ daily life related to the use of ICT. The application of ICT in students’ daily activity can show their motivation and their attitude in sing it. Thus, this paper assignment will further talk and explain about the issues appear to students. Additionally, this paper assignment will also proposed some conclusion remarks based on the facts appeared in the field.

As we know that students differ in their motivation towards learning English and they display many different attitudes towards learning a language. A student that has negative attitudes towards learning English could be changed and turn those negative attitudes into positive ones and get a positive result. This will be further discussed below.

The fact that we can find at school is that the teacher sometimes cannot create a good media to overcome the situation above. As we know that computer-assisted language learning (CALL) allows the combination of different online resources through multiple hyperlinks, a feature common to most online searches and many offline utility. With the expansion of CALL, more questions have been raised. Issues of learning style, motivation, attitude, personality and some other factors have come to the fore with the use of computers. Students who see CALL as an important part of the course also have a high level of motivation and attitude in learning English.

In the learning process, students will show different attitudes and it will be different between one and each other. Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) can affect the students’ attitude in learning process. All the students agree that they are proficient in computers and they are integrated with them. This can be seen through the use of students’ gadget in their daily life. This statement is supported by the study conducted by Önsoy (2004) who also confirmed that there were differences between the learning process that using computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and the one that do not. In his thesis, he stated that students and teachers demonstrated positive attitudes towards the use of computers in daily tasks and in language instruction. However, the findings showed that there were statistically significant differences among the perceptions of students in terms of their levels. The findings also indicated that students and teachers believed that training was required and they believed that they needed training to learn and teach with computers.