Using Music: An Effective Medium of Teaching Vocabulary in ESL Classroom (METHODOLOGY)

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How is life everybody? I hope it's always amazing. Thank you very much for coming back to my blog and read my writing. I really appreciate what you have done, friends. 

In today's post, I woud like to continue the topic from my previous post a.k.a reviewing about a Journal of English Teaching entitled Using Music: An Effective Medium of Teaching Vocabulary in ESL Classroom by Takwa Sultana Jahan. Since on the previous post I talked about the structural parts of the journal and its introduction only, therefore at this post I would like to post about the next parts of the journal, that is, the Methodology. 

In case you have not seen or read my previous post about the structural parts of the journal and its introduction, here is the link: 

METHODOLOGY

Based on the structural parts of this journal (you can see them on the previous post), we have known that there are two subparts of the methodology including the Description of the Participant, and the Procedures of the Research. The further explanation of them would be explained below.

The main aim of the study was to examine how to what extent using songs in the English language teaching classroom can create an impact and initiate on better vocabulary memorization. The author also wanted to know the musical preference of the students to gain better idea on student’s musical taste and to apply this to class room teaching; and finally to have an insight about their perception on song oriented Language class. 

Description of the participant 

Subjects participating in the study were 50 students from a private university located in the capital city of Dhaka. The study was carried out among two groups , each consisting of 25 students aged from 17-18. All of them are in their tertiary level from two classrooms. The students had two classes each week .They were having their Fundamental English course in their first semester. For the investigation two groups were formed : Music and Non music.

Music group consisted of 25 students and Non music group consisted the same number of students from another section. Songs were selected carefully giving importance on the lyrics and theme. For running the test the teacher used multimedia and good sound system to create atmosphere . The songs used in the class are “Skyfall” by and The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel, were based on vocabulary items such as fill in the gaps, search for synonyms, translation and making sentences with target words.

Procedure: 

As stated before in this study vocabulary acquisition was investigated under two conditions: (1) Music and (2) No Music. Three kinds of data tools were used during the experiment. A preliminary questionnaire and an evaluation interview after the lesson with music group. The students were given a pre test and a post test. Finally, teacher’s observation was added too. 

The experiment started at the beginning of the year in Spring trimester. Before the experiment begins, the teacher conducted a preliminary questionnaire to know the taste and attitude of learners towards songs. Both the groups were given the same questionnaire containing questions about their musical preference and the frequency of their listening to music. The survey consisted of total 8 short questions. The aim of the questions was to find out if the learners are interested in listening to English music or not. After the preliminary survey was done, the teacher went through the result and carefully selected the songs close to their preference. 

Next day both Music and Non Music group were given a pre test based on the vocabulary selected from the two songs. Total 15 words were selected from the two songs: One is “The Sound of silence” by Simon &Garfunkel and “Skyfall” by Adele. Both of the groups were asked to write the meaning of the words they know. They were allowed to use Bengali equivalent in case they fail to express in English. 

Post-Test 1 was conducted music group one day after the Pre-test. The teacher played two songs: “Hello darknes, My Old Friend by Simon & Garfunkel” and “Skyfall” by Adele. The students were handed with the lyrics with blanks to fill up while listening to the songs. The first lyrics contained fill in the blanks, writing the meaning and doing translation. They listened to the song and filled up the blanks. And after finishing they all sang the songs when those were getting played again. On the same day, the Non music group was given the same songs but without the music. They were handed with the lyrics with blanks and the missing words were given in the table from where they had to guess. 

Right after one week both groups were tested once again in post test II where they had the same 15 words. They had to write the meaning of 7 words and frame sentences with other 8 words. Both of the groups didn’t know there would be a test and they didn’t revise and work on the words at home either.