The effect of chanting activites on the comprehension of English of first graders and college freshmen Taipei

This study investigated the effect of chanting activities on the English listening comprehension of ESL students in Taipei. The chanting activities were developed using existing themes from the ESL classroom. Songs were selected based on specific criteria. While chanting was the focus of the lessons, singing was encouraged but not required. Two experiments were conducted with different age populations. Experiment one included a population of first grade children. A quasi-experimental design was used. Nineteen songs were selected as the treatment. Students were exposed to forty minutes of English instruction per week for eighteen weeks, for a total of twelve hours of class time. Data was obtained from 56 subjects in the treatment group and 57 in the non-treatment group. The assessment tool for experiment one was developed by the author. Ten questions were included. The focus of testing was the listening comprehension of vocabulary. Findings indicated that: (1) chanting activities increased vocabulary comprehension; (2) chanting activities affected vocabulary comprehension positively in nouns and verbs; (3) frequency of occurrence of target words affected vocabulary comprehension for elementary first graders. Experiment two was conducted using a population of college freshmen. Data was collected from 31 subjects in the treatment group and 31 in the non-treatment group. Treatment for the experiment was ten songs. The assessment tool consisted of 30 questions from a TOEFL listening comprehension practice examination. Data from this study led to the following results: (1) chanting activities increased listening comprehension for college freshman; (2) chanting activities had the greatest impact on the grammatical categories of perfect tenses; (3) although chanting activities can affect both children and adults positively, the effect on the younger subjects was greater than on the older students; and (4) the effect of chanting activities on listening comprehension of vocab