It has been reported that learning English by singing is an interesting and effective way (Baker, 2007; Calvert and others, 1993; Hamner, 2003; Lems, 2002; Shih, 1980), but a systematic investigation on its effects of learning English seems to be lacking.
The researcher conducted a quantitative study (sponsored by Providence University) in 2008 to discover the effects. 20 college students in Taiwan participated in the study. 10 of them were in the prose group and the other half ‘learned English by singing’.
Ten English songs were chosen (Always, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, She, Memories, Dream, Yesterday Once More, On Top of the World, Let it Be, Trouble Sleeping, and Fernando) and were rewritten into the prose form by two Americans.
At the beginning of the study, all of the subjects took pretests of listening comprehension (on the levels of sentences, dialogues, and paragraphs) and an oral test (of 1 minute impromptu speech with 2 minutes preparation on a given topic).
Then, the prose group studied English paragraphs with the same content as the 10 English songs, introduced to the ‘singing’ group, with lyrics explained. After these 10 weeks, all of the subjects took posttests (the same listening comprehension test, the same format of oral test on a different topic, and a cloze achievement test).
The test scores did not support the general belief that learning by singing is more effective. That is, in the song group the differences between pre-tests and post-tests were not significant except for the listening tests, but in the prose group the difference was significant.
These results showed that the prose group instead of the song group made significant progress. The implication of this study parallels that of Calvert et al. (1993); i.e. singing with little effort leads to limited information processing.
No comments:
Post a Comment