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Journal 4~Rhymes, Stories and Songs in the ESL Classroom
Joy L. M. Brown
jmbrown [at] una.edu
University of NorthAlabama (Florence, Alabama)
The main idea of this article is about the values of using Rhymes, Stories, and songs in the ESL classroom.  The author mentions "Use of traditional songs, stories and nursery rhymes in the ESL classroom can create an excellent learning experience for the ESL student.  In addition to the cultural value, traditional songs, stories and nursery rhymes may help with pronunciation practice and literary skills. "   in the beginning paragraph.  I totally strongly agree with the author.  For ESL students, they did have the disadvanages on participating in conversations or watching movies if they lack the knowledge of cultural elements native speakers of English may take for granted.  He also mentions that nusery rhymes and songs can be good ways  for ESL learners' to practice their pronuciation and build up the vocabulary.  For examples, singing  'Mary had a little lamb ' to practice the "L" sound and 'Row, Row your boat" to practice the "R" sound, and the ' Twinkle Twinkle Star' to practice the rhyming words 'star' and 'are', 'high' and 'sky'.  For building up the vocabulary songs, he takes ' The Hocky Pocky' and 'Head, shoulders ,Knees, and toes' as examples to combine with TPR to teach the body parts.  Also, it was mentioned that songs can be a good resources for teacher to use as a good tool of teaching grammar.   There are high frequency of repetition in a song that makes the learners to be familiar with the theme sentence pattern or vocabulary or grammars.  The author also suggest many other resources like fariy tales, tongune twister and so on.  Once we find the songs and rhymes, it's easy to create the lessons.  the important thing is how to use the materials to develop the learners' language skills and build their literacy skills. 

As I stated eralier that I strongly agree with the point of view of using rhymes, songs and stories in an ESL or EFL class.  So I  like to use songs and chants in my young learners' classes.  I love the song " Head, shoulders, Knees, and toes', I used it to teach body parts and have them play some games to connect the real body parts with the lyrics.  Through playing and singing, children learn unconciously.  From my teaching experiences, I found that I need to find songs and tones that kids are familiar with to apply to the content I taught.  For examples, I use the " Two tigers" tone to sing the song I made by myslef, kids are quick to sing along or humming with the class.   I like to read a story to younger learners as well, little kids are easy to be fascinated by the aggrandizing action from storytellors.   I would like to add something that  the author didn't mention in the article, that is using the song or rhymes can be a good way to do the classroom management.  For 3 to 5 mintiues at the beginging of the class, using a rhyme of ' 1,2 buckle my shoes' in the class, teacher can gather whole class attention and concentrate on the lesson content.  It also can be a good way to cheer up students from lower atmosphere.

Last, about usig stories, once I made the 5th greaders to read a story by themselves and act it out in the class.  Then I found their abilities are more than I thought.  They created their own story plots and make the props.  What they achieved is way beyond that I expected.   So Kids are creative and they do have the abilities to do more.  Sometime it's not students lack of abilities, it's us lack of teaching creativity and trapped in our limitations.

"Using them to teach ESL students can be fun and educational for everyone involved.  Vocabulary, intonation patterns, sentence structure and many other things can be taught in addition to giving ESL students another way to understand the new culture in which they live. "  stated at the last by the author.  Here, I have to say,'Using them to teach our students can be fun and educational for everyone involved.  Vocabulary, intonation patterns, sentence structure and many other things can be taught in addition to giving our students another way to understand the culture and language in which they are learning. "


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