Fun Ways To Use Songs To Teach English To Children
Learning through songs engages young minds in new and unique ways.
Learning English through song allows your child to have an important break from traditional study. Singing English songs enriches your child’s free time with purpose and creates a new way for them to remember key language.
Why are songs so good for teaching English to children?
Joy is a motivating factor in language acquisition. Children naturally enjoy singing songs. If a teacher or parent sings too, it’s even better.
Share your child’s passion and interest by listening to English songs and singing along with them.
Songs can help young learners improve their listening skills, pronunciation, and speaking skills. Singing allows children to pick up new vocabulary in context, especially when the vocabulary is reinforced visually.
Songs effectively teach grammar
Grammar lessons at school might be dry and boring, but songs never are. Children who are singing listen and repeat accurate sentence structures without realizing that they are learning. This is how we all learn language ourselves.
We take in language as children from parents and teachers without being explicitly taught grammar. By the age of five, most children have developed an innate understanding of the grammar used in their environment. By singing English songs, children are subconsciously improving their English listening and speaking accuracy.
Language learning apps such as Fun English by Studycat allow children to improve their English listening and speaking skills.
Listen to songs as comprehension practice
Songs help improve listening skills because they provide students with practice listening to different forms of intonation and rhythm. English has a stress-timed rhythm, for which songs can help to establish a feeling. Songs are memorable because music works on both short and long-term memory.
Songs also have a natural rhythm with a common beat that is similar to the stress patterns of spoken English. Songs therefore become useful for practising rhythm and stress.
Sing songs to perfect pronunciation
As children, we learn the pronunciation of our native language by listening and then repeating what we’ve heard. That process is difficult to replicate in a classroom, and that’s why pronunciation is difficult for students of English as a second language.
By listening to English songs, children get aural input and their brains retain what they’ve heard, including the native-English pronunciation and word stress of English words. As they sing along to the music, they are actively copying the process which leads to proper pronunciation. Listening to songs will aid your child’s pronunciation exceptionally well.
Songs help children learn English by:
- Motivating your child
- Expanding vocabulary
- Helping with grammar and sentence patterns
- Improving your child’s intonation, word stress and pronunciation
- Improving listening and comprehension skills
- Improving confidence while speaking English and overall communication
- Adding enjoyment to the language learning experience
This article was first published on StudyCat.