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Teach English in Baitutan Zhen - Zhuzhou Shi

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In my work, I want to describe the meaning of using songs in my classes. Whether we teach young learners or adults, it is essential to have this kind of entertainment to make our classes funny, productive, and exciting. We can use this tool at any stage of a lesson. It depends on the purpose of this activity, which has many variations considering our students' needs and motivation. Firstly, I would like to write about young learners. Children have less of an attention span compared to adults. Teachers must change the types of activities through the whole class with at least 5 mins frequency. Also, the sitting activities must be switched with standing activities to make students more engaged and entertained. We do not have to make the singing activity only while sitting or standing, and it is a flexible decision. However, we have to admit that a song is an integral part of all the classes with children. Songs (better mix with dancing) are in every single coursebook because rhythms help to memorize vocabulary quickly. Songs are a kind of drilling material (repetitive learning), which is necessary at any stage of learning a language. We can base the entire content of the course on songs. So, we need to find and prepare other activities for studying and explaining the lyrics. If we do so, the song can be put at the beginning of a lesson for review, in the middle of a lesson as an engaging stage, and at the end of a lesson for better memorizing and securing the material. The situation does not change a lot with adults. We still need to entertain our students; we still need to gain their attention. From this point of view, singing perfectly fit's in our classes. It does not mean that we must use the same songs, as for young learners, or the songs from the course books. Sometimes adults do not like singing unknown songs and find it confusing. We can use the songs from their life, which they really enjoy. Furthermore, we do not need to make students sing. We can use them as material for listening and improving our speaking skills. At different stages of the lesson, a song can have different purposes in our classes. We like to use songs at an engage phase. Sometimes the song is related to the content we are going to discuss, sometimes we choose a song to cheer them up. Actually, for the same reason, we can use a song in the middle of a class as well. Nevertheless, listening to the music during a lesson is not only for entertainment. There is a bunch of useful and resent language structures, which can be not clear for our students so that we can discuss them. Also, I suggest at the early stage of learning a language to listen to the songs at home to help students improve their listening skills through an effective method as Background hearing. In my opinion, singing songs is a beneficial activity, which is not in vain included in almost all course books. Rhythms are valuable if you need to memorize structures and words. Also, songs are an excellent tool for "easy" homework to review content, because to a greater extent, they are entertaining in nature.


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