| In China, new English curriculum standard of the full-time ordinary high school in 2013 briefly states that high school English curriculum must adopt the course pattern of combining compulsory courses with elective courses. For the knowledge objectives of Level 7 to Level 9, students are required to learn to use 2400-4500 words, a certain number of idioms as well as fixed collocation. In the practice of English language teaching, teachers tend to spend a lot of time and energy on vocabulary teaching but there’s little gain. Teachers and students are at a loss what to do about vocabulary learning because of its complex structure. Now more and more teachers realize that they can make full use of the elective course with relaxed learning environment to enhance students’ vocabulary learning and memory and to further promote the students’ vocabulary acquisition.The song is a kind of art form covering both poetry and music, which is regarded as human language and the importantly indispensable way of communication. Listening to and singing English songs can stimulate the brain so that built high-spirited excitement of the right brain nerve, which can not only inspire thinking and make language resonated but also help enhance memory. In addition, the studies and practice based on second language acquisition further verity the effectiveness of music on the development of English language. Vocabulary, one of the basic elements in language, is the fatal backbone of the enormous institution of language, which plays decisive role in English teaching. Thus, it’s the high time to improve vocabulary teaching methods and means. There are a mass of students in domestic English classroom. Teachers always apply the single test and evaluation mechanism to evaluate students and too much emphasis on grammar rules. Facing the reality, teachers should try to explore more vivid and more effective English teaching methods, especially in vocabulary teaching.Based on these points, this paper is intended to investigate whether the application of English songs in the elective course would help improve EFL senior high school students’ vocabulary retention or not. In order to verify this hypothesis, the author conducts a teaching experiment in XueJun High School trying to explore the following issues:(1) Is senior high school students’ vocabulary retention enhanced by employing English songs in elective course teaching?(2) Does difference exist between two different teaching methods in the aspect of occurrence of involuntary mental rehearsal(din) of the vocabulary?(3) What’s the difference between immediate and delayed vocabulary retention of the students who learned the vocabulary through songs as compared to those who learned them through reading the lyrics?(4) What is the relationship between senior high school students’ preference for English songs and their vocabulary learning performance?The experiment was operated in two parallel classes: an experimental group—Class A and a control group—Class B. In Class A, English songs were used to teach vocabulary while in Class B vocabulary was taught by listening and reading as the teaching methods. Through two months’ experiment, the result demonstrated that the experimental group gained much higher scores than the control group did, and there was a significant difference between the two classes. Then we come to the conclusion that the application of songs in English vocabulary teaching and learning enhances vocabulary retention and learning performance. |
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