A Study On MIT-based Instruction Of Children's English Songs In Normal Schools

With the rapid economic development of our society, primary school English education has become the centre of public concern. It is known that normal school students are the main force of primary education business. Their comprehensive qualities will undoubtedly have a deep impact on the future of our country. Consequently, for normal schools which shoulder the heavy responsibility of cultivating qualified primary education personnel for the state, it is an imperative task to equip students with a strong level of English knowledge and skills. However, these schools are now faced with an awkward situation of English teaching. Because of the expansion of college enrollment, students admitted into normal schools are generally poor in their studies. In class, most of them remain passive and show no interest in learning. As for normal school teachers, a large portion of them tend to ignore the differences of individual learners and impart knowledge of the language without providing any creative activities. Day by day students are tired of learning or even lose their self-confidence completely. Even after years of learning, they can not have a good grasp of the target language. Facing the problems mentioned above, the practice and research on helping students learn more effectively to lay a solid foundation for their future role is of theoretical and practical significance.Many scholars agree about the value of English songs for language teaching since they are especially popular with the youth and can provide a favorable atmosphere to motivate students'passion for English learning without psychological burden. Some of them even did researches that proved significant correlation between musical activities and students' learning achievement. Children's songs, as part of this category, are characterized with musical presentation of natural comprehensible expressions which also embody the essential factors of English language such as:sound and intonation, rhythm and rhyming, structure, vocabulary, idiomatic usage, and language function. Compared with other types of songs, they are easier to understand, learn and grasp and tend to be of more acceptable language learning resources for students who don't have a solid foundation of English knowledge. Introducing them into normal school English classroom in an appropriate way will be beneficial to achieve a constructive teaching result. But the fact is that children's songs are used only for activating the classroom atmosphere in most cases, and the typical process of song instruction follows the same pattern:briefly introducing the new words and explaining some difficult lines to help students understand, then playing the song repeatedly for them to sing along until they're able to do it by themselves. There is no doubt that overuse of such a monotonous activity can hardly sustain the learners' interest. Besides, as the language points in song lyrics are dealt with superficially and to use the songs for phonetics or oral English training is ignored, even students who are capable of remembering a number of lyrics still feel it difficult to express and communicate freely.The Multiple Intelligence Theory has been prevailing in modern education field, which advocates that teachers should address students' individual characteristics of intelligence and provide a range of activities and experiences to facilitate learning. Inspired by MI theory and its satisfactory outcome of research both at home and abroad, this thesis tries to probe into the function of applying children's songs based on it in normal school English classroom, with the aim to prove the following assumption:Teaching English children's songs based on MIT in classroom will come to be great assistance to achieve a more satisfactory teaching result. It takes both the unique features of children's songs and students' individual differences into consideration and provides multifarious activities to make full use of their potential intelligence of learning.With positive attitude and active involvement, students are able to absorb and use the language knowledge more naturally and thus reach the ultimate level of proficiency.The participants in this research project are students of grade one in Hengyang Normal School and there are 50 students in each class. One class is treated as experiment group and another one is control group. The experiment group is given treatment, namely, using songs based on MIT in classroom to facilitate teaching while the control group is taught in traditional methods. Three data collection instruments were used in the study:Questionnaires, Student Interviews, and an Experiment. After one term treatment, comparison about English grades and English learning interest are made between the two classes.On basis of both the theoretical and experimental support, the results show that the teaching technique of applying children's songs based on MIT challenges teachers'traditional opinion towards their students and teaching and produces positive outcomes on developing students' listening and speaking ability as well as their learning efficiency in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. It plays a positive role in both teaching and learning. The problem that has troubled English teaching in normal schools for a long time will be solved in a measure.