Writing for Academic Purpose

Final Test Assignment

Teaching English through Song To Improve the Students English Ability

Written By:
Kartika Wahyu Astari NPM : 07420256 5 F

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND ARTS IKIP PGRI SEMARANG 2009
Out lining
1

 Introduction
Topic sentence: music effect on humans being, beside to express humans feeling, music can be used to improve students ability in English. Supporting points: Supporting details: Music brings peace to humans bodies and minds. High-energy music makes a person feel better because it helps to normalize a heart beat. Many people use music to express her or his feeling.

Body
Topic sentence Supporting points Supporting details : the advantage of songs in a classroom activity. : song as an effective media to improve students pronunciation, vocabulary, and many others. : Songs have messages that reflect human experience and clarify suitable feelings. English songs can help the students to enrich their vocabulary and improve their ability in speaking and listening by means of imitating and memorizing the words of the songs. By listen to the music, the students can understand certain messages of the songs and
2

they are able to express their ideas with their own words in a speaking class. Songs are one of the most enchanting and culturally rich resources that can easily be used in language classroom activities. Song gives new insights into the target culture.

Conclution
Topic sentence Supporting points Supporting details : the consequence of using song in a classroom. : what should the teacher attent when she/ he use the song in a classroom : The teacher may encourage extensive and intensive listening, and inspire creativity and use if imagination in a relaxed classroom atmosphere. The techniques of the teacher provide to aid the language learning process

Teaching English through Song

to Improve the Students English Ability

Have you ever wondered what effect music has on human beings? Many people sing a song. And everybody likes singing. Based on this statement, the teacher can use the song to improve the students English ability. It is almost impossible to avoid listening to music whether you choose to or not. Music fills shopping centers all over the world, escapes from peoples houses and cars, and it is all we hear on 90% of worlds radio and TV stations. Many people use music to express her or his feeling. Research has shown that music can affect us whether we like what we hear or not. Some types of music make help us to relax whereas others may provoke violent reactions. Medical staffs in various medical centers have been using music for healing purposes for sometime. Music brings peace to patients bodies and their minds. Gentle harp music has been more effective than tranquilizers or sleeping pills such music is known to have been played to patients before the major operations. Moreover, according to some psychiatrists, music can alter states of mind it either heals or can have the opposite effect. All music is thought to be divided into three types: lowenergy music, high-energy music, and prayerful music. Low-energy music makes a person feel bad. Rock music is thought to belong to this category: in many cases it makes people feel hatred instead of love. Such music acts like a drug - a body gets addicted to the beat, and a need for louder beat develops. High-energy music makes a person feel better because it helps to normalize a heart beat. Bach as well as some other classical music is exceptionally high-energy music.

Prayerful music has the most healing effect of all. Organ music which is played during church services brings peace to peoples minds. Music can be use as a media to improve students pronunciation, vocabulary, and many others. Although English language is difficult, but the writer tries to use one of method in English learning is listening based on the song to improve the students English ability. The writer believes that every student loves to hear music particularly songs. Songs, especially English songs, can help the students to enrich their vocabulary and improve their ability in speaking and listening by means of imitating and memorizing the words of the songs. For those who love to hear music, they just have fun on music although they do not understand the spelling and meaning. Parallel to this, Plummerridge (1993:3) claims : ..the real function of music begins at a point where words, intellectual appended have no place. Its inherent significance is outside the range of the purely rational mind. A special exercise of the imagination is needed in order to recognize a musical ideas a disciplined expression of deep and obscure human emotion. Furthermore he suggests that music does not always need intellectual words. It also needs a special exercise of the imagination to express deep and obscure human emotion. It is interesting to analyze ideas of the song found in English song. Reimer (1989 : 41)reveals that music is a language of the heart. Songs have messages that reflect human experience and clarify suitable feelings such as romance, melancholy, uncertainly, anxiety, and security. By clarifying suitable feelings we may not have through our capability of experiencing.
5

However, textbooks do not always suggest tasks or exercises to suit students needs, so it is up to the teacher to decide how to improve the listening activity, in example think out pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening tasks. As an alternative to textbooks songs, teachers can record top-pop songs that are often broadcast by popular radio stations. Although this will require some extra work on the teachers part, e.g. transcribing the text, thinking out the activities, etc., it will pay off in class when students hear familiar music, enjoy listening to and singing it and learn thing or two in enjoyable manners. It is quite possible that the educational phenomenon dates from the origin of mankind; the verbal transmission of experiences might have been a necessary requirement to assure survival. It is understandable, therefore, that the success of the teaching-learning process depended at that time largely upon the speaking and memorizing ability of teachers and learners. Nowadays, it is sad to admit that in spite of the development in the educational and technological fields, the teaching activities seem to have stayed behind in a primitive stage. There are not few teachers and institutions that base their pedagogical praxis only on verbal communication and memory, which seen as unique learning resources, limit greatly the horizons of learners. There are indeed many different materials that may be brought to class to support the teaching-learning process: regalia, software, flash-cards, transparencies, slides, videos, cassettes, etc. In this work, however, I will focus on the convenience of teaching a language through music and song. I will justify their use, and I will present ten different activities in which music and song may be used in language teaching.

Why teaching a language through music and songs? Nowadays it is not easy to escape music and songs as it, as a whole, occupies ever more of the world around us. It is very common to listen to music and songs in shopping malls, offices, restaurants, and even churches. And for those who tune in to an iPod or i-Phone, music and song is literally everywhere. We can say that it has become part of our daily life. By listen to the music, the students can understand certain messages of the songs and they are able to express their ideas with their own words in a speaking class. Listen to the song can also help the students to improve their ability in speaking of listening. Teacher also can use songs as an alternative way to encourage students to speak in English. Songs are one of the most enchanting and culturally rich resources that can easily be used in language classroom activities. They are precious resources to develop students abilities in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They can also be used to teach a variety of language item such as sentence pattern, vocabulary, pronunciation, rhythm, adjectives and adverb. As stated by Lo and Fai Li (1998:8) learning English through songs also provides a non-threatening atmosphere for students, who usually are tense when speaking English in a formal classroom setting. Songs also give new insights into the target culture. There are the means through which cultural themes are presented effectively. Since they provide authentic texts, they are motivating. Prosodic features of the language such as stress, rhythm, intonation are presented through songs, thus through using them the language which is cut up into a series of structural points becomes a whole again.
7

There are many advantages of using songs in the classroom. Through using contemporary popular song, which are already familiar to teenager, the teacher can meet the challenges of the teenage needs in the classroom. Since songs are highly memorable and motivating, in many form they may constitute a powerful subculture with their own rituals. Furthermore, through using traditional folk songs the base of the learners knowledge of the target culture can be broadened. Correctly chosen traditional folk songs have the dual motivating attack of pretty tunes and interesting stories, plus for many students the added ingredients of novelty (Hill, 1999: 29). Most songs, especially folk song, follow a regularly repeated verse form, with rhyme, and have a series of other discourse features, which make them easy to follow. In consequence, if selected properly and adopted carefully, a teacher should benefit from songs in all phases of teaching grammar. Songs may both be used for the presentation or the practice phase of the grammar lesson. They may encourage extensive and intensive listening, and inspire creativity and use if imagination in a relaxed classroom atmosphere. While selecting a song the teacher should take the age, interests of the learners and the language being used in the song into consideration. To enhance learner commitment, it is also beneficial to allow learners to take part in the selection of the songs. Ways music and songs may be useful in language teaching. There are different ways a teacher may use music and songs in language teaching. However it is up to both, teachers and students, to decide how much and in what ways these tools may be exploited. Tim Murphy (1996) recommends to start by using music and songs in small doses, as an experiment, trying to find out in what ways it
8

might increase students interests and motivation for learning. For instance, putting on some background music while students are doing a composition, or at the beginning or end of a class, will not only create a relaxing atmosphere, but also, will give teachers the opportunity to ask students about their musical preferences. In this way teachers can tune in to their students interests, becoming more sensitive to their tastes; allowing students, not the teachers, to choose the material which will have the greatest impact in their learning process. Students then would be more involved in the lessons, being responsible of the material they work with in class, while the teachers would be responsible to provide students with the necessary techniques; acting as a resource for the language learning process. In other words, the students would be in charge of the what, while the teacher would be in charge of the how, creating a mutual respect with an interaction of equal importance. The question now is: what techniques can a teacher provide to aid the language learning process? We know that music and songs as a whole, is not one of the conventional categories of language study (grammar, vocabulary, reading, etc.). But it can be the content matter of any of these categories. According to Tim Murphey (1996), in language teaching, anything we can do with a text, we can also do it with songs, or texts about songs: We can study the grammar in the lyrics of a song We can practice selective listening comprehension We can practice conversation using dialogues based on the words of a song We can practice pronunciation, intonation, and stress We can learn new vocabulary

 We can practice choral repetition. In learning teaching process, songs can be an effective media to learn English. The teacher can explore the song, so the student can enjoy the learning teaching process and get the advantage of the song. The teacher can give the lyric of the song. There are some blank, and the teacher give the instruction to fill in the blank based on the song that the teacher going to play. This is the example of the lyric of the song entitled When You Tell Me that You Love Me, popularized by Westlife featuring Diana Rose:

10

When You Tell Me That You Love Me

By Westlife featuring Diana Rose I ______ call the stars down from the sky I wanna leave a day that ______ dies I wanna ______ the world only for you All the __________ I wanna do I wanna hold you close _______ the rain I wanna ______ your smile and feel the pain I know whats beautiful _____ at you In a world of lies you are the truth And baby every time you _______me I become a hero Ill make you safe no ________ where you are And bring you Everything you ask for ______ is above me Im _______ like a candle in the dark When you tell me that you love _____ I wanna make ___ see just what I was Show you the l_________ and what it does You walk into my life to stop my _____ Everythings easy now, I _____ you here In a world without you, I will always hunger All I need is your love to make me stronger There are some ways to explore the song. The teacher can instruct the students to fill in the blank based on the song. And the other ways are the teacher instructs the students to underline the difficult words, looking for adjective phrase, looking for noun, verb, adverb, and adjective: translate the song and many other.
11

If the students often to hear the song, the students will be fluent to speak English. Singing is an easy way of memorizing something. Most of us can probably remember having learnt the multiplication tables with a specific tune. Melody seems to act as a path or a cue to evoke the precise information we are trying to retrieve. So, for example, we are able to rehear mentally the voice and words of a person with whom we have had an argument. Similarly, while reading the notes taken in a lecture, we will probably rehear the lecture's voice, while at the same time we can mentally visualize the place from which s/he was talking and even her/his gestures or body movements. Music seems to leave a particularly deep race in our memories this could be due to the fact that it is related to affective and unconscious factors. It could also be related to the hypothesis that it is less energy demanding because musical perception starts before birth. Use of songs in the language classroom encourages students to be quiet because it avoids other auditory distractions. Therefore, it is especially helpful to create the relating classroom atmosphere. Songs has the ability to change the hearers mood because it stimulates our imagination. It can be argued that using a musical approach at the input stage will accomplish several goals: first, verbal practice associated to musical information seems to be more memorable; second, allowing students to give a choral melodic repetition of the new language just taught lowers their anxiety filter; and third, by strengthening their musical memory, the appropriate foreign sounds will be stored in the students' long term memory, and thus be accessible for sub vocal rehearsal.

12

 Thank you

13