VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
 VŨ THỊ HỒNG VÂN

PRINCIPLES OF USING ENGLISH SONGS IN TEACHING
ENGLISH TO FIRST YEAR STUDENTS AT HO CHI MINH
UNIVERSITY OF INDUSTRY
CÁC NGUYÊN TẮC SỬ DỤNG BÀI HÁT TIẾNG ANH TRONG GIỜ
DẠY TIẾNG ANH CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ NHẤT TẠI TRƯỜNG
ĐẠI HỌC CÔNG NGHIỆP THÀNH PHỐ HỒ CHÍ MINH

M.A. MINOR THESIS

Field : English Teaching Methodology
Code : 60. 14. 10 Hanoi – 2012

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
 VŨ THỊ HỒNG VÂN

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1. Reasons why English songs should be used as teaching materials. 5
2. Materials in foreign language learning and teaching 7
3. Principles of developing teaching materials 7
3.1. Materials should achieve impact 8
3.2. Learner’s attention should be drawn to linguistic features of the input. 8
3.3. Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target
language to achieve communicative purposes. 8
3.4. What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and
useful. 9
3.5. Materials should take into account that learners differ in learning style and
affective attitude 9
3.6. Materials should help learner feel at ease and develop confidence 10
4. Previous studies on using songs to teach English 11
4.1. Teaching grammar 11
4.2. Teaching Vocabulary 13
4.3. Teaching Pronunciation 13
4.4. Teaching listening 14
v

4.5. Teaching speaking, writing and reading 16
CHAPTER 2: A STUDY ON USING SONGS AS TEACHING MATERIAL IN
TEACHING ENGLISH TO FIRST YEAR SUTDENTS AT HUI AND
SUGGESTED PRINCIPLES OF USING SONGS TO TEACH ENGLISH 17
1. Research approach and questions 17
2. Participants 17
3. Data collection instrument 18
4. Procedures of data collection 18
5. Data analysis 18
6. Results of data analysis 19

Pie chart 5: The degree of language improvement thanks to the use of English
songs
Table 1: Aims of using songs in language classroom
Table 2: Activities with songs
Table 3: Difficulties when using songs to teach English
Table 4: Language components and skills improved thanks to the use of English
songs
1

PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
As a result of the globalization, English nowadays is playing a more and
more important role in helping people to communicate with others from all over
the world. As the common language of the whole world, English is an essential
requirement for those who want to study abroad, work in a foreign country or

teaching aids such as pictures, flashcards, PowerPoint, games, stories and songs.
Among those, songs seem to be the most popular to students and also more
frequently used by teachers than others. However, the effectiveness gained
through using songs is still not high as expected. Although songs have been
proved to be a very interesting teaching materials and have been applied in
teaching in many European countries, this method still seems to be a new one for
Vietnamese teachers in general and the teachers at Ho Chi Minh University of
Industry (HUI) in particular. Most teachers still meet difficulties in working out
the way to exploit the maximum benefits of songs in English classroom. It seems
that teachers just spontaneously use English songs as an entertaining tool to relax
students not a teaching aid. Teachers fail to set a particular pedagogical aim or
follow a specific rule of using songs. Generally, songs are often played at the end
of the lesson when teaching and learning is finished and students are sitting to wait
for the bell rang. Sometimes teachers also let students listen to English songs at
break time; hence not all students pay attention to the songs. Sometimes songs are
also put in the course books as an extra task such as listen to the song and fill in
the blanks. However, teachers tend to have different ways of carrying out this task.
While some teachers ignore this task and just let students sit and enjoy the music,
other explain the instruction and let students listen to the song, get them to finish
the task and then check as an exercise. They rarely explain what students can learn
from the songs or have no further activities or tasks for the students after having
students listened to music. Therefore students often forget the song right after
listening or even if they are interested in the song, they do not know what to do
with it. In short, for most of the students at my university, they just regard songs as
3

a means of entertainment not a useful tool/source of learning English. For
teachers, most of them have not succeeded in exploiting the pedagogical benefits
of English songs except for the entertaining and relaxing benefits. As a teacher of
English at the university, I am also very interested in using songs as a teaching aid

first term of the academic year 2012- 2013.
5. Design of the study
This study contains three main parts as follow:
Part A is the introduction in which I would like a present the rationale of
choosing this topic, the aim of the study, the scope of the study and the
methods to be applied.
Part B is the development which includes three main chapters:
 Chapter 1 is about the theoretical background related to the purpose
of the study
 Chapter 2 deals with investigating the situation of using English
songs in teaching at HUI and finding out the principles of using
songs to teach English for first year students at Ho Chi Minh
University of Industry
 Chapter 3 is concerned with applying the proposed principles of
using songs in teaching English at HUI and then evaluating the
feasibility of these principles when applied in real teaching at HUI.
Part C is the summary of the major findings in Part 2 and suggestions for
further study. This part also contains the List of References and Appendices.

5

PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW


Harris, 1993; Griffee, 1992; Guglielmino, 1986; Lems, 1984; Little, 1983;
Monreal, 1982). The enjoyment of learning language through song is directly
related to affective factors.
Cognitive Reasons
It‟s widely known that automaticity in language learning is one of the
factors that help learners become fluent communicator. Accroding to Gatbonton
and Segalowitz (1988, p.473) atumomaticity is “a component of language fluency
which involves both knowing what to say and producing language rapidly without
pauses”. Kevin Schoepp (2001) confirms that the main cognitive reason for using
songs as teaching material is that songs can enhance learner‟s automaticity. This is
understandable because automaticity is traditionally believed to occur through
repetition. The nature of songs is fairly repetitive and consistent and, therefore,
helps facilitate language learning as well. For example, a song such as “Lemon
tree” – a very famous pop song provides sample opportunities for students to focus
on the study of the present progressive in English Grammar with the lyrics
containing a lot of sentences in the present continuous.
Linguistic Reasons
In Kevin Schoepp‟s opinion, linguistic factor is also a reason that teachers
use songs in the classroom. By using songs, learners can be exposed to the
informal or colloquial language which is often met in real life. Some songs are
excellent examples of colloquial English. Let‟s take the song "My Best Was Never
Good Enough" by Bruce Springsteen as an example. This song is a prime example
of a song that demonstrates colloquial language use. Students will hear many
colloquial sentences such as "Every cloud has a silver lining." and "Every dog has
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his day” in this song. Hence, using songs can prepare students for the genuine
language they will be faced with.
Finally, two studies, Domoney and Harris (1993) and Little (1983) once
again confirm the importance of music to language learning. These two authors

focus more on the principles that can be applied for using songs in language
classroom, thus, the next section reviews these.
3.1. Materials should achieve impact
Materials should have good influence on learners by bringing them curiosity,
interest and attention. Brian also recommends some ways to achieve these
noticeable effects as below:
a, novelty which means something new to the learners
b, variety which means the teaching materials have to help break up the boring
atmosphere that often exists in English class. In order to do this, the author
suggests teachers should use diverse sources of materials in a funny way that
students haven‟t experienced before.
c, attractive presentation with attractive colors, lots of white space and
photographs.
d, appealing content. By this Brian means material developers should bring to
the class interesting topics that attract students‟ attention. It may be something
new, universal to the students.
3.2. Learner’s attention should be drawn to linguistic features of the input.
According to Tomlinson as well as other researchers, when introducing to
students any kind of materials, teacher should not forget to draw students‟
attention to the related linguistic features because helping students take notice of
the linguistic features through materials can help them acquire language
consciously or subconsciously step by step.
3.3. Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target
language to achieve communicative purposes.
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Tomlinson (1998) analyzes that “learners should be given opportunities to use
the language for communication rather than just to practice it in situations
controlled by teachers and materials” According to Ellis (1990) “ideally teaching
materials should provide opportunities for such interaction in a variety of

the use of materials in language class. Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982) state that “
the learner‟s motives, emotions, and attitudes screen what is presented in the
language classroom … This affective screening is highly individual and results in
different learning rates and results” (cited in Tomlinsion:1998). Tomlinson (1998)
also supports that learner‟s attitude can be their attitude about the language, their
teachers, their peers and their learning materials. These factors play an important
part in deciding the effect of the using materials in the lesson. However learner‟s
attitudes are unstable and variable. Therefore, Tomlinson admits that catering for
all of these affective attitudes and studying learners‟ difference in attitude about
the materials is a challenging but necessary task for material developers.
Regarding the solutions for this issue, Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991) (quoted in
Tomlinson: 1998) come up with an idea that is “ to diversify language instructions
as much as possible based upon the variety of cognitive styles and the variety of
affective attitudes likely to be found among a typical class of learners”.
3.6. Materials should help learner feel at ease and develop confidence
Tomlinson in his book “Materials development in language teaching” cites
the opinions of Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982) on learners‟ language acquisition
that “the effects of various forms of anxiety on acquisition: the less anxious the
learner, the better language acquisition proceeds. Similarly, relaxed and
comfortable students apparently can learn more in shorter periods of time”. It is no
doubt that the learning atmosphere and students‟ psychology is a determined
factor in language acquisition. Therefore materials developers need to help
learners feel at ease if they want their students to acquire the language maximally.
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4. Previous studies on using songs to teach English
It has been demonstrated that “music is a trigger that improves academic
skills such as vocabulary and grammar and also develops linguistic abilities”
(Martin, 1983; Mitchell, 1983; Jalongo and Bromley, 1984)
Li and Lo (1998) also have come to conclusion that songs provide a break

song, having learners‟ practice singing the song.
Thu (2005) once again exploits songs to motivate students in learning
English grammar. In her study, she has clearly pointed out the benefits of songs in
teaching grammar to both teachers and learners. Among those, there are some
main remarkable benefits such as providing more choices for teachers among
techniques used in teaching grammar, helping students memorize the grammatical
rules more easily and more enjoyably. Thu (2005) also states that choosing songs
for the grammar lesson is a very important step. According to her, choosing
songs must be based on students’ level, students’ age, students’ interest,
grammar points to be studied and features of the song. Undoubtedly, these are
very brief and useful suggestions for teachers when selecting songs to teach
grammar as well as other skills. Besides, the author also focuses on presenting
activities designed form songs to teach Grammar. From her point of view, songs
can be used for all of the phrases in grammar lesson such as warming up,
presentation, practice and production. This is totally right, however what a pity
when the author demonstrated how to use songs in the warming up and production
stage, she seemed to lose her way. It turned out that the author mainly used songs
for activities focusing on speaking not grammar. For the practice part in grammar
lesson, Ha (2005) suggested a lot of interesting activities with songs such as
identifying particular parts of speech, giving the right form of the words in the
brackets, multiple choice, blank filling, and creating new lyrics and so on.
Generally, the most common aspect of English grammar exploited in practice
activities is English tenses.
It can be said that although the effect of English songs to teaching grammar
has been proved, the matter of how to use songs to teach grammar still needs a lot
of discussing and researching.
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4.2. Teaching Vocabulary
Generally, students often have trouble in learning vocabulary. They often

them, getting better at recognizing them and producing them”. For learning words,
In Veronika‟s opinion, songs fitting the music and containing memorable rhythms
can help students associate with the syllables, the stress in the words.
Besides, songs can be useful for teaching three other elements of
pronunciation such as word stress, rhythm and intonation (Mai: 2010). As she
explained “students like to imitate singers; therefore, students would likely to
imitate their ways of making sounds”. Additionally, the song‟s tune going from
low to high, up and down is a good example for students to follow the ways of
making stress and intonation in English. In Mai‟s study, she limited the range of
songs that can be used to improve learner‟s pronunciation and just focused on the
“traditional songs” as a teaching material. This is a limitation of the study. Solely
using traditional songs can restrict the source of songs for teaching and make
learners easily get bored with music and the lesson. Like other aspect of language,
pronunciation can be taught with many kinds of songs of different kind of music
as long as they bring about the pedagogical benefits.
There are some kinds of tasks teachers can design from songs to teach English
according to the difficulty level of English songs as below:
Text
Task
Difficult to hear the text
matching the words with their pronunciation
Easy and short text
mistake correction
Difficult or long text
multiple choice
Long text
gap filling

4.4. Teaching listening
There have been a lot of studies proved that songs can be used as an

which can be designed from songs, teachers still need careful consideration in
terms of the appropriateness of the tasks and the songs.
Another noticeable thing is that these activities are designed with the main
aim of practicing in the while-listening stage. However, teachers can also flexibly
16

use them in other stages such as warm-up or post-listening in the form of a game
to cheer the students or to help them revise the knowledge.
4.5. Teaching speaking, writing and reading
It‟s easy to understand when grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation is
improved through English songs, other skills, especially speaking skill will be
therefore improved. Chuanxuan Shen (2009) demonstrates that singing an English
song demands familiarity of a number with phonological rules such as liaison, loss
of explosion, assimilation, voicing, deletion, and so on which help students
enhance their speaking fluency. According to Shen (2009), songs also help refresh
the boring atmosphere in writing lesson. Teacher can ask students make a new
version of the original song on their own by following the same tune, imitating the
format of the lyrical lines. Therefore, writing the lyrics by imitation might be a
effective way of digging out students‟ creativity in language. The right song will
arouse their empathy, stimulate their inspiration and light their passion to express
their experiences and emotion in the same way.
In general, the previous studies have shown that there are many ways to use
songs to teach English and songs are used to teach a variety of aspects of English.
Normally, songs are used with the aim of improving students‟ proficiency in terms
of language components such as: grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation; and
language skills. Due to the features of English songs, songs can be exploited to
enhance listening skill much more than other skills like reading and writing and
speaking. In order to achieve these above targets of using songs in English
classroom, teachers need do a very important job that is always discussed in
previous studies is choosing the appropriate song and designing tasks from the

3. Data collection instrument
Questionnaire for teachers
This research was conducted as a qualitative study, using questionnaire for
teachers. The questionnaire is used in the research since it is one of the most
popular instruments in gathering data. Moreover, because the informants are from
different campuses namely Thai Binh and Thanh Hoa, questionnaire turns out to
be a quite convenient instrument for the researcher to collect the data via email in
a short time.
The questionnaires for teachers are used to investigate the necessity of
using songs in language classroom, the way teachers use English songs in
language classroom, the difficulties that they may encounter while using songs and
to search for solutions to those difficulties. These issues are respectively analyzed
in eight questions in the teachers‟ questionnaire (see appendix 1). Based on the
results of investigation, the researcher can draw out some principles of using songs
in teaching English.
4. Procedures of data collection
The data was collected as the step below:
Step 1: The researcher delivered the questionnaire to teachers to investigate
their opinions on using songs to teach English, their encountered difficulties as
well as their experience of using English songs.
Because of the small number of English teachers at the researcher‟s
university, other English teachers from other schools are invited to get involve.
Eight questionnaires are delivered directly to 8 English teachers at the researcher‟s
campus and 12 questionnaires are sent via email to the teachers of Ho Chi Minh
University of Industry at Thanh Hoa campus. The information was collected
within one week in the third semester of the school year 2011 – 2012.
5. Data analysis
Data from questionnaires were analysed quantitatively via Excel for
descriptive statistics in the form of pie chart, percentage and frequency. Data from
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The usefulness of English songs in
language teaching
20

The frequency of using English songs in language classroom
Before using songs, all of the teachers have awareness of setting out the
aims of using English songs with the total 100%.
Table 1: Aims of using songs in language classroom
Motivate students to learn English
100%
Enhance students‟ listening skill
75 %
Enhance students‟ speaking skill
30%.
Enhance students‟ writing skill
10%
Enhance students‟ reading skill
0%
Enhance students‟ pronunciation
50%
Enhance students‟ vocabulary
45%.
Teach grammar
45%
Make students relaxed
95%
Kill the time
45%)