Report on the implementation of songs and poems in the ESL classroom.

During my one week School Based Experience (SBE) Program, I conducted an observation on classroom teaching session. The teaching session was conducted by Madam Jane Anak Amit, an English teacher. I entered her Year 2 English lesson class for my observation on whether she used songs and poems in her teaching session. For my observation, I used interview as my instrument on observing her ESL session. The interview was mainly about her teaching method and her intention on whether to use songs and poems in classroom. During the interview, I asked her about the types of songs and poems that she usually used in her ESL classroom. She said the she usually follow what was her focus of the lesson. She revised her lesson plan and organized everything that she need for her lesson. Mostly, she used songs more compared to poems. Song genres such as nursery rhymes and children pop were used during her ESL classroom. Students enjoyed the songs especially when actions were included. She also explained that activities such as poison box and round-the-chair were the common activities that she implemented in her teaching. She also adapted songs that she thought was suitable and applied it to her lesson. When I asked her if she still used songs and poems in her lesson, she truthfully said no. She said that she rarely used songs and poetry in her lesson now due to the reason of the schools focus on academic quality. Her lesson now focused more on giving questions and extract questions from revision book. It was not her intention to change the lesson strategy to Question and Answer (Q&A) method, but the students academic level was very low and the school decided to improve their level by giving exercises for them to answer. I experienced it first hand when I entered her class where she split the students into small group and formed a group teaching session. It was true to say that the students were taught by using only exercise books and teacher had to assist them in almost any question that they done. Before I ended my interview, she commented that the schools way to counter the problem was not efficient to really teach students English and she strongly agreed that using songs and poems were more effective compare to Q&A method.

After I had experienced the lesson with Madam Jane, I concluded that the implementation of songs and poems in lesson is crucial for students to learn English better, especially Year 2 students. Those students were too young to be exposed to boring learning method and there were no guarantee that by giving them questions to answer can improve their current state. What should be done is giving teacher a chance to try different method such as using songs and poems in lesson to stimulate their interest to learn and love the language. I hope that there would be changes later.