The Effectiveness of Song-based EFL Instruction at the Tertiary Level

David, E Shaffer

Article

Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2004;5(2):65-83.
Published online December 30, 2004.

The Effectiveness of Song-based EFL Instruction at the Tertiary Level

Abstract

The aim of this study is to quantitatively examine whether the use of song through a cloze-type activity is as effective as or more effective than non-musical methods in the learning of lexical items and syntactic structures. To this end, one experimental group was exposed to a song and later was asked to discuss it, while a second group was exposed to only the lyrics before discussing them. A control group receiving no instruction was also included. Through a Korean-to-English translation pretest and two post-tests, the effectiveness of the musical and non-musical teaching methods were compared. In overall test scores, the song group performed better than the lyrics group, showing that the use of a song in a lesson is more effective than the introduction of the lyrics in the absence of the song. The test scores also indicated that the song group outperformed the lyrics group on both the lexical item questions and the syntactic questions, indicating that the use of song is more effective especially in teaching syntactical structures and lexical items.

Key Words: song;effectiveness;teaching methodology