Customer Reviews

Jazz Chants®: Second Language: Cassette

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the most significant challanges for an ESL instructor is to motivate adult learners to try to speak the language. Jazz Chants has proven to be an excellent tool for me to achieve this goal. The Chants are theme-based and provide sufficient repitition to allow learners to practice the sounds and reach a level of comfort and feel successful. The use of humor adds significantly to the reception the chants receive. The students visibly respond with joy as they recognize the intended joke. Humor breaks down barriers and enhances the learning experience. Choral speaking works particularly well with beginners since they are most reluctant to give voice to their new language. They have a degree of anonymity in this environment, encouraging even the most timid to try out the words. I might think carefully about its value with more advanced students but in my beginner's class I wouldn't be without it.

I think Carolyn Graham's chants are great for helping ESL/EFL students learn and enjoy English. They really liven up a class and I like using the tape as it's got some background music. However, I wish it were on CD so it would be easier to locate the song you want to do each time you want to do it.

I have used these chants with Non-native English speakers who are trying to improve their accent. Small Talk Chants helps with linking words, sentence stress and shifting sentence stress for subtle changes in meaning. It is a great way to demonstrate prolonging vowel duration, pause, and pitch to stress a word. The students find the chants very helpful.

This version of Jazz Chants has more vocabulary than "Small Talk," and thus is good for false beginners. Chants are wonderfully empowering for students; they make students feel fluent right away, as well as starting them down the road of acquiring the rhythmn and intonation so particular to American English. Great concept!

I originally got this material when I was teaching a pronunciation class in New York to highly motivated adult learners who wanted to improve their accents. My students were mostly Asians and Hispanics. The Korean language has no stressed syllables, which makes their English sound robotic. My Hispanic students wanted to give every article and preposition the same stress as the nouns and verbs. Carolyn Graham's JAZZ CHANTS is just what they needed to get them to understand what natural sounding English is like. Most of them had been under the impression that it was the poor speaker who did not emphasize every "and" and "the." JAZZ CHANTS gave them practice in speaking naturally and I think the students felt a great sense of accomplishment when they were able to do it correctly. A sense of accomplishment is what keeps students motivated.

But I have found this program to be extremely versatile and can be adapted to just about any lesson. I am now teaching teenage Arab boys who are only taking my class because English is a required subject. Here I use JAZZ CHANTS to supplement grammar lessons because the chants are really drills that don't seem like drills. They're fun! So far I have found "The Banker's Wife's Lament" to be an exceptional learning tool because Arabs, for some mysterious reason want to say "he is work" instead of "he works" and "I am study" instead of "I study." (I say "mysterious" because in Arabic there is no verb "to be" in the present tense. I have no idea why they want to make it part of every English verb.) This particular drill forces them say it correctly or lose the rhythm. The students truly love JAZZ CHANTS and are disappointed on the days when we don't have time for them. One caveat for the teacher: schedule the chants for the end of class because it's impossible to calm them down after the high energy of these exercises.

Although the book and the CD are sold separately, they really should be packaged together. The teacher needs them both. It's quite possible to get the rhythm wrong if you don't have the CD (on "Turn Right," for example, there's a section that you would have no idea was in double time without the CD) and the book lays out very clearly which exercises stress which particular grammar points, saving a lot of time on lesson planning.

For me Carolyn Graham's JAZZ CHANTS are an indispensable tool for the English language teacher. I constantly find new ways to use them. If I ever get into a situation where I can design my own curriculum, I'm going to make JAZZ CHANTS the centerpiece of my course, rather than supplementary material. I highly recommend this material to any ESL teacher. I'd give it more than five stars if I could.

Am I right in assuming this book does not come with a CD? I don't want to buy it without knowing first. It seems a CD would greatly help in teaching the material (and make the titleword "jazz" a little more honest). This is a question, not a review (sorry)