Chant all about it!
Very Young Learners
Very Young Learners (VYLs) are usually defined as under seven years of age, for the purpose of this article we will be considering English as a foreign language (EFL) lessons with students aged between three and eight years old. That said, I have observed chants being used effectively with all primary-aged students so it will depend on you and your students’ preferences and what they enjoy.
Before we look further into the world of chants, what do we know about VYLs as learners? We have defined them as three to eight years old. Within that age group are varying cognitive abilities and motor skills and an important set of emotional needs. They will still be in the process of learning L1 and are likely to have limited literacy skills. VYLs may or may not be used to formal learning and if they are, they may have a different experience to the methods and approaches that we use in a communicative EFL classroom.
VYLs are typically curious, enthusiastic and happy to make some noise. They may be easily distracted and are usually keen to play. They are most likely singing and chanting quite a lot in their L1 as part of their explorations of language. We also know that they are natural language learners primed for picking up language.
Chants
I realise that not all teachers who work with VYL students are thrilled by the idea of singing in class, fortunately chants are less daunting than songs because they don’t need to be sung, they can be spoken, with rhythm.
Google’s English language dictionary (provided by Oxford languages) defines a chant as ‘a repeated rhythmic phrase, typically one shouted or sung in unison by a crowd’.
Chants combine rhythm and repetition to become a powerful tool in the VYL toolkit.
Why use chants in the VYL classroom?
If you are not using chants in your VYL classroom, you really are missing a trick. In 15 years of observing 100s of lessons, the use of chants or not has proved to be a top deciding factor in the success of a lesson.
Chants are very useful for capturing and holding students’ attention, for example, to give instructions or transition to a new task. Once used a few times, they are instantly recognisable and are a very effective way of getting a group’s attention.
Have you ever seen a group of young students get very upset because their teacher is off sick? Not because there is anything wrong with the substitute, but because they lose the safety net of the known, the predictable routine. Chants can be built into a class routine and routine is very comforting for VYLs. They know what is happening, they understand what is expected of them and they know what to do. Predictability and routine are useful in the VYL classroom because they take the stress of the unknown away from students, removing the affective filter (Krashen, 1982) which means they are more open to learning.
Chants help shyer students by providing an occasion when they can practise language without feeling exposed or put on the spot. They can join in without drawing attention to themselves or fearing making a mistake.
Chanting or singing together creates a sense of bonding and community in a class, thus they can be used to create a positive environment which helps support students to feel more confident about exploring a new language.
If you introduce movements and actions with a chant, it become a multisensory experience which supports memory and learning.
Chants provide an opportunity to repeat language without it getting boring (see below for some ideas of how to vary your use of chants and to keep them interesting).
The first stage of any chant is listening to it. Chants provide listening practice, supporting comprehension from an early age in a nonintimidating way.
Chants can be used to introduce or practise lexis, lexical chunks and structures. They present language in context. There is a danger of working with target language as isolated items in the VYL classroom; using flashcards and the restricted lexical sets often provided in coursebooks, we can miss opportunities for language presented in a meaningful context. By using chants, we are more likely to present language in a broader context. The repetition of this language supports retention.
Chants support learners of mixed abilities in the classroom. Some students will join in with a chant straight away, others may take a few lessons and others might only join in with key words. That’s OK. One of the joys of using chants is that children naturally copy them, and they will do so to the extent that they are able, when they are able.
Chants provide repetition. In many cases, a chant is effectively a frequently repeated drill. It gives the learners multiple opportunities to hear and practise making sounds in a way that does not feel boring.
Chants provide pronunciation and intonation practice.
Children explore a wide range of sounds both aurally and orally and become more confident at using their own voices. These fundamental requirements lay the foundations for further phonemic awareness.
– Macgregor and Birt, 2008:4
In addition to practising individual sounds, many chants will naturally make use of the stress-timed nature of English, use intonation at a phrase level and features of connected speech in a natural way.
Chants involve the children in a memorable activity that they are very likely to repeat outside of the classroom allowing parents to get a glimpse of what is happening in the classroom.
And most importantly, they are fun, which means that children like them and are more likely to participate when we use them.
When should we use chants?
Chants can be used, if you want to, at most points of a lesson. Don’t only use them at the start or you miss the opportunity to take advantage of all the benefits above.
As previously mentioned, chants are very good at grabbing students’ attention. As a result, they are ideal for classroom management.
Songs and chants are also very versatile classroom management tools, which you can use as warmers, transition markers or coolers to meet your teaching objectives for a particular lesson.
– Reis Esteves (2016:56)
Chants are effective for signalling a transition from one stage in a lesson to another, and so are often used as part of class routine: at the beginning the lesson (a hello, day-of-the-week or weather chant); during the lesson such as when students need to move places or to take out their books (a sit-in-a-circle chant, a sit-in-your-chairs chant, a get-ready chant, a books-on-the table chant); and at the end of a lessons (a tidying up, saying goodbye chant).
Chants have been used for decades in playgrounds around the world to select a player or participant, use ‘dipping’ to nominate a student. You might know ‘ippa dippa dation’.
Ippa dippa dation
My operation
How many people at the station?
[Answer with a number – students enjoy participating, I suggest you restrict it to numbers 1–10]
The one who gets to number
[Same number as above]
Will surely not be it.
[Everybody counts up to the number together.]
Use chants when starting a new topic or revising and reviewing language, this is when old favourites like the alphabet song, the colours of the rainbow and ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’ come in. There are many songs and chants that you will already know that will link to the target language usually presented in a VYL course. And if there isn’t one, make your own!
How can we use chants?
First of all, we are not striving for perfection and we are not simply drilling. Let children join in at their own pace and to the best of their abilities. It doesn’t matter if their pronunciation isn’t perfect the first time around.
Notice your pronunciation and try to keep it sounding natural with linking sounds and unstressed sounds.
Create actions to go with your chants and stick to them – write them down if you think you might forget them!
Keep it simple, keep it repetitive and build it into your routine.
Make your own!
There are two ways to create a chant:
- Start with the words, create a simple rhyme or repeated phrase and find its natural rhythm, for example:
‘Put your books on the table, put your books on the table and
get your homework out, and get your homework out.’
- Start with the sound, pick a tune and add words to it, for example, to the tune of ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ use the classroom management chant:
‘This is the way we tidy up, tidy up, tidy up,
this is the way we tidy up and put the things away.’
If you are using a chant for classroom management, you will probably chant it while they pack up, or line up or get their books out; and they will, of their own accord, start to join in.
If you are using a different type of chant to introduce language work, you may want to explore different ways that children can engage with the chant.
Activities with chants
- Humming a chant helps students get used to rhythms before they are ready to say all the words.
- Incorporate tapping or clapping to the rhythm as an easy first step to engaging with the chant and noticing the rhythm of the language.
- Join in with one part, for example, the counting.
- Join in with the most repeated part.
- Split the class into two groups who say half of the chant each, this works especially well with question-and-answer chants like this:
Group A: Can you swim?
Group B: Yes, I can
Group A: Can you jump?
Group B: Yes, I can
Group A: Can you fly?
Group B: No I can’t!
- Hand out flashcards with vocabulary from the song and students raise the flashcard each time they hear or say the word.
- The same as above, but display the flashcards around the room and learners point to the flashcard.
- Sing or say the chant in a funny voice or at a different pace, for example, slower or faster.
- Mix it up. Once they are able to join in with the chant comfortably, switch out different elements, for example: ‘Clap, clap, stamp, stamp, bye bye Fari, bye bye friends’ could change to ‘click, click, wave, wave’ and so on.
Conclusion
Chants can be used to create a routine framework for VYLs that has a myriad of additional benefits supporting students in their learning. There are examples in most VYL books and online, but you can easily create your own, too, and adapt them to your context and your students’ needs.
References
Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second language Acquisition. Pergamon.
MacGregor, H. & Birt, C. (2008). Singing Phonics A. & C. Black Publishers Ltd.
Paul, D. (1996). Songs and Games for Children. Macmillan.
Reis Esteves, V. (2016). ETpedia Young Learners. Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd.
Rogers, R. (n.d.). ‘Promoting active listening in bilingual schools through music, movement, song and sound’. The International TEYL Journal. Available from https://www.teyl.org/article10.html (Last accessed 7 October 2024).
Roth, G. (1998). Teaching Very Young Children: Pre-school and Early Primary. Richmond Publishing.
‘chants’. (2024). Google Dictionary. Google. Available from https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/ (Last accessed 7 October 2024).
Fari Greenaway is an experienced academic manager, manager trainer, teacher trainer, author and school inspector, committed to fostering reflective practice among EFL educators. Through workshops and her Instagram (@farigreenaway) she empowers professionals to refine their skills and drive excellence in language teaching. From teacher to academic director, with nearly 20 years’ experience in English language teaching, 15 of those in academic management, Fari currently oversees a team of nine academic managers across five academies, managing 59 teachers and 3,000 students.
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