The Effects of English Songs in Learning Vocabulary for Young Learners

Abstract

This research is aimed to proof that English songs can be used as interesting tools to teach English for kids, especially for teaching vocabulary. As mentioned by Millington (2011), the crucial effect of using songs is to help learners to be more enjoyable in learning. A song is something which is closed to the kids and singing is an activity which is fun for them. Besides, song lyrics consist of simple daily words. Teaching English using songs can be used as an alternative tool because kids learn those words unconsciously. This research was conducted in Poncokusumo, a village located in Malang, Jawa Timur. The participants were seven elementary school students from two different schools. They were eight until ten years old. One student was from State Elementary School and six students were from private elementary school. The reason of choosing this village is because there was no research using English songs conducted there. Another reason is because the learners’ and parents’ knowledge about English songs is limited. Compared to a year ago, the internet connection is much better today, but they do not have any references to access the English songs from the internet, especially to use them as tools for learning English. Some steps were done by giving pretest, treatment, posttest, and conducting interview. Pretest was done to know the participants’ knowledge related to the songs that were used. Then, the treatment was done by teaching those participants using songs that were chosen. In this step, the song lyrics used had simple words and easy to remember. After that, the posttest was done to get the results of the treatment. In the last step, one-by-one interview was conducted to gain some results related to the learners’ responses toward the use of songs in learning English vocabulary.