USING JAZZ CHANTS TO IMPROVE THE EIGHTH GRADERS

GRAMMAR MASTERY OF SMPN 6 MALANG’S STUDENTS

Dewi Eriana Fadlyn, Furaidah, and Sintha Tresnadewi

Email: dewieriana9@gmail.com; furaidah02@yahoo.com;
sintha2709@gmail.com
Universitas Negeri Malang

ABSTRACT: English is an International language used in many aspects of

people’s daily life. From the researcher’s teaching experience on her
internship at SMPN 6 Malang, the researcher still found some mistakes in the
sentences made by the students. That is why the researcher thinks of using
Jazz Chants to enhance students’ grammar mastery, but still in implicit way.
This research’s goal is to improve grammar mastery of the students in 8-8
class of SMPN 6 Malang especially on simple present tense. The finding
shows that jazz chant can improve students’ grammar mastery after two
cycles.

Keywords: Junior High School Student, Grammar mastery, Jazz Chant

English is one of the most important skills to survive in the modern era.
This is because English is an International language used in many aspects of
people’s daily life. Therefore, with the demand of the globalization, it is necessary
to learn English. English education in Indonesia has undergone many changes
since its first launch on 1967 based on the decision of Minister of Education and
Culture. From a very passive method like grammar translation into a very student-
centre teaching like we what use now, communicative approach. Based on
curriculum 2013, this communicative approach does not allow the teacher to talk
too much; instead, they have to look for a way of teaching that gives students a lot
of opportunity to use the language by themselves. This approach premises its
belief in the view that language is communication (Bagaric and Djigunovic, 2007).
From this, we can conclude that this approach itself demand students to speak
more. Like the name, in communication approach students learn by
communicating. The approach emphasizes on its communicative purpose.
From the researcher’s teaching experience on her internship at SMPN 6
Malang, the researcher saw that this communicative approach did not only give
some benefit to the students, but also some difficulties. The best benefit from it is
that it allows students to speak more and grasp the material by themselves. They

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can use their own style of learning. However, there are also some weaknesses. By
the end of the internship, the researcher asked the students to make greeting cards,
containing what they wanted to say after the researcher taught them for the whole
six weeks. These greeting cards topic had been taught in the internship program,
not long before it ended; yet, the researcher still found some mistakes in the
sentences made by the students. The mistakes found were not about the structure
of the greeting cards but more on their grammar, how they formed the sentence.
The result on the students’ greeting cards showed that those activities were
not enough. Grammar is important because of its significant function in
communication. The students need to understand the grammar so there will be no
misinterpretation. Here, when the students made mistakes on the greeting cards,
the message they are trying to convey might not reach the reader of their greeting
cards. This will also work the same on other materials. In this matter, Lock (1996:
266) stated that grammatical competence was a part of communicative
competence. Therefore, to obtain an effective communication skill, people should
pay attention to grammar because it may help enhance accuracy.
This fact does not make the researcher think that grammar should be
taught first, but the researcher think that it would be much better that students can
learn some of it, grammar that still related on their supposed to be taught materials,
but implicitly. That is why the researcher thinks of using Jazz Chants to enhance
students’ grammar mastery, but still in implicit way. Carolyn Graham (2006)
stated that Jazz chants are a unique way of linking the rhythm of natural spoken
language to the rhythm of music. There are some variations of Jazz Chants
depending on what purpose it will be used by the teacher. They are divided into
two groups, topic Jazz Chants and grammar Jazz Chants. The topic Jazz Chants
are always related to some specific topics like hobbies, occupations, holidays, etc..
Whereas the role of grammar Jazz Chants is to teach or practice some English
grammar such as different verbs, prepositions, tenses, questions, answers,
imperatives, structures like there is/are, to be going to, or for example pronouns.
Jazz chant also has this repetition nature, which make the students practice
a sentence repeatedly during the practice, either with different structure or with
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the same structure. However, jazz chant’s focus is not all about repetition, here the
researcher only used it on a certain stage of teaching which was association stage.
Some research has been done regarding the use of jazz chants and most of
them gave positive result. A research done by Naufal Afif (2015) stated that jazz
chants are very useful since they can improve students’ speaking skill especially
describing job. Other research has been done by Jin Zhang (2011) where the
researcher stated that listening and speaking are probably the most important
skills a person needs to be able to communicate and also the first ones to be
obtained either in learning the mother tongue or any foreign language. Peralta and
Quito (2010) also had done other research where they used jazz chant to improve
young learners in teaching-learning process of English.
Based on all previous research that shows positive result, the researcher
decides on doing this research but modified the focus of the use of jazz chants.
Since jazz chants can be used to improve many things, such as vocabulary,
pronunciation, listening and speaking, and also grammar, the researcher want to
focus on using jazz chants to improve students’ grammar, especially in the context
of simple present tense. The researcher decides to focus on simple present tense
because according to the time the researcher doing this research the material
taught on the eighth grade is descriptive text, so that it will be easier on the
process and will not interrupt the teaching process programmed by the teacher.

METHOD
This research used collaborative Classroom Action Research (CAR) as the
research design. According to Latief (2015:146), “Classroom action research is an
effective media in improving the quality of English’s teacher’s performance in
instruction as well as students’ achievement in learning English in classroom”.
This research aims to improve students’ ability on producing grammatically
correct sentences in simple present tense. In this study, the researcher worked
together with two colleagues. They helped during the implementation stage as
observers while the researcher directly taught the class.
The setting of this study was at SMPN 6 Malang Malang. The school is
located at Jl. Kawi No. 15A, Bareng, Klojen, Kota Malang, Jawa Timur. In
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addition, the subject of this study was the eighth grader students, especially 8-8
class. The reason why this class was chosen was because the researcher taught in
the school for six week as a student teacher. This made the researcher aware about
the difficulties faced by the students of 8-8 class.
This study was conducted in two cycles, with each cycle consisted of four
stages. Those four stages were planning, implementing the technique, observing,
and reflecting. The first cycle failed because the students could not meet the
criteria of success yet, so that the researcher needed to continue to the second
cycle. The stage on the cycle two is the same with cycle one, but there is some
difference on the implementation stage. The researcher decided to add some
activities but it did not make the lesson plan from the first and second cycle had
significant difference.
The instruments that the researcher used on this study were lesson plan,
grammar test, observation sheet, interview guide and questionnaire. The criterion
of success of this study was if at least 70% of target students’ got score above 75
for their grammar mastery. The researcher chose 75 as the minimum passing score
for the criteria of the success because this is the minimum score decided by the
school to decide whether the students has reached a certain level of competence or
not (KKM). The researcher hoped to match the standard, which had been set by
the school.

FINDINGS
The implementation of the jazz chant in this research was divided into two
cycles. This happened because on the first cycle, the criteria of success had not
been reached yet. Students score in grammar was gathered trough grammar test.
The grammar test was used for all pre-test and post-test. On grammar test, the
researcher provided 20 questions, which 10 of them were multiple choice and
another 10 of them are short answer. The average score of the pre-test is 55.7,
which could be considered as low considering the minimum standard score
(KKM), which is 75.
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Students Grammar Score

Cycle 1

100%

80%

60%
Failed
40%
Passed
20%

0%
Pre-test Post-test 1

From the table of the students score above, 32 students were joining this
research. Out of 32 students, only two students got score above 75, while the rest
had quite variation on their score, from 26 as the lowest and 74 as the highest.
However, on the post-test, there were some small improvements. The
average score increased, from 55.7 to 67.75. It was considered quite well in the
light of the pre-test score. From only two students, the number of the students
passing the test increased to eight. From those eight, one of them experienced
some decrease in his/her score even though he/she still passed the post-test. Still,
it was only 25% from the total of the participant and considering the criteria of
success, this research had not met the criteria of success yet.
The lesson plan used for the cycle one had some weaknesses resulting on
the researcher conducting the second cycle of the research. In the second cycle,
finally the research result met the criteria of success. The adding of the exercises
showed a great improvement on the students’ score on the grammar test.

Students Grammar Score

Cycle 2
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100%

80%

60%
Failed
40%
Passed
20%

0%
Post-test 1 Post-test 2

On the cycle 2, the average score used this cycle increase because there
was improvement on the score happened in the cycle 1. Different with cycle 1
when the researcher got a quite low result, in the cycle 2, the researcher saw a
quite significant improvement. Beside the increase of the average score, the
number of the students who passed the second post-test increase significantly. On
the first cycle, there are only eight students passed the test, apparently 25% of the
students, while the rest failed. However, on the second cycle, the result was
reversed. There were only eight students failed the second post-test while the rest
passed it. From eight of them there are two students who experience some
decrease on their score and one students whose score stays the same with the first
post-test. While the other five students who failed the second post-test experience
some increase on their score but has not met the score set for the criteria of
success yet.
The average score of the second post-test also significantly increased from
67.75 into 80.94. In this cycle, there were 24 or 75% of the students passed the
test. Therefore, considering the criteria of success that stated that if at least 70% of
the students passed the post-test with at least 75 as their score, this research could
be considered successful.

Students’ Opinion
In this research the researcher also provide some simple questionnaire with
10-checklist statement where the students only need to choose between “YA” or
“TIDAK” and five open-ended questions to dig their opinion about the strategy
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proposed by the researcher, in this case jazz chant, more. The result of the
questionnaire is as follows:
Table 3.3 The Result of Students’ Questionnaire

Siswa Siswa
No Pertanyaan menjawab menjawab
YA TIDAK
1. Saya memahami apa itu Jazz chants. 25 7
Saya mengerti cara penggunaan dan fungsi
2. 25 7
jazz chants.
Penerapan jazz chants membantu saya untuk
3. 25 7
lebih memahami tentang grammar.
Teknik jazz chants yang memberikan saya
kesempatan untuk menggunakan/
4. mempraktekkan sebuah pola kalimat secara 27 5
berulang-ulang membantu saya untuk
memahami pola kalimat dengan lebih baik.
Kegiatan yang dipersiapkan guru dengan
5. 27 5
menggunakan jazz chants menarik.
Kegiatan lain ynag dipersiapkan guru (game,
dll.) untuk menunjang pembelajaran
6. mendukung dan memberikan kemudahan 25 7
pada saya untuk memahami materi tentang
grammar.
Saya merasa lebih mudah dalam mengerjakan
7. test yang diberikan guru setelah belajar 27 5
grammar dengan menggunakan jazz chants.
Saya termotivasi untuk belajar grammar lebih
8. 23 9
giat setelah menggunakan jazz chants.
Saya termotivasi untuk mempraktekkan
9. bahasa inggris lebih sering karena jazz chants 23 9
mengajarkan untuk banyak-banyak
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mempraktekkan sebuah pola kalimat untuk

pemahaman ynag lebiha baik.

Saya termotivasi untuk menggunakan jazz

10. 21 11
chants pada materi pembelajaran lain.

Teacher’s Opinion
After the implementation of the study, the researcher interviewed the
English teacher to know how the implementation stage from the English teacher’s
point of view was. Interview guide was used to focus the interview on what
important points that the researcher would like to know.
The English teacher first thought that the technique proposed by the
researcher was unique but, this technique was hard to prepare. However, when the
technique used by the right teacher, in this case a teacher who can produce a good
jazz chant, she stated that this technique has some potential. The English teacher
also stated that the way of repeating the jazz chant was good, but she gave an
addition that the result will be better if all the students could be more committed
to the learning process. In the first cycle, she mentioned that the students were
quite uncontrolled. Also concerning the lesson in the first cycle, she stated that the
activity where the teacher guided the students to conclude the sentence structure
from the jazz chant was not enough. She added that explaining and giving
example was good but exercises were also needed to make sure that the students
really understand and got the idea of what they were just learn. The English
teacher also stated that she was quite impressed since the teacher realized it by
herself and add some exercise on the cycle 2.
There were also some weaknesses on the implementation witnessed by the
English teacher. First, the jazz chant needs a lot of practice beforehand and
confidence. The melody for the jazz chant used by the researcher was unfamiliar
for the students, and when the researcher tried it for the first time, the researcher
seemed not too confidence so the students also not sure about the melody and they
faced some difficulties in following the example of how reciting the jazz chant by
the researcher. Also, this jazz chant activity was a free and supposed to be
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enjoyable for the students, so the students might get too carried away so the
researcher need a good and appropriate additional activities to keep them on track.
Another weakness was about the fact that the material was hard to make, so other
teacher might feel burdened to make such material using jazz chant.
The English teacher also stated some positive point about the
implementation of jazz chant. The first one was the repetitiveness, since when
something is practiced repeatedly; the nature of being able to remember the
pattern unconsciously is very advantageous. The second was the flexibility. The
verb and subject used in the jazz chant can be changed so that it can be used to
teach different tenses. The last one, besides increasing students grammar mastery,
jazz chant also help to reinforce students’ speaking skill. Since the activity
requires a lot of practice and the students practice it while chanting it or in other
word, they do the speaking activity, so their pronunciation will also get better.

DISCUSSION
Students’ Grammar Mastery and Motivation
Based on the findings, the implementation of jazz chant successfully
improved students’ grammar mastery especially on simple present tense. The
improvement happened in both cycle one and cycle two, but the improvement
happened on cycle one had not met the criteria of success yet so that the
researcher continued the research to cycle two. In the second cycle, the number of
the students who reached the standard increased significantly. Therefore, it is
concluded that the research was successful because 70% of the students passed the
test, which not only met the criteria of success but also surpassed it.
This result matches the previous studies that show some improvement on
students’ grammar and students’ ability to make a sentence with a good structure
using jazz chant. Based on the research done by Afif (2015) which suggested the
other researcher to try jazz chant to improve students’ grammar, this suggestion
had been proven to be successful by the researcher. However, in the process,
different from Afif’s research which only needed one cycle, this research needed
at least two cycles to be successful. From this research, the researcher also notice
another positive result. Jazz chant is a good technique to live up the mood. Since
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learning grammar was always been boring for the students, jazz chant could
provide a more enjoyable activity to learn grammar.
Maribel Peralta and Guadalupe Quito (2010) also had done other research
where they used jazz chant to improve young learners in teaching-learning process
of English. On their research, it is stated that jazz chants provide an innovative
and exciting way to improve students´ speaking and listening skills while
reinforcing the language structures of everyday situations.
Fonseca-Mora, M.C., Toscano-Fuentes, C. & Wermke, K. (2011) also
supported this statement by stating that learning through music will help the
students to activate both hemispheres of their brain. Moreover, Moradi &
Shahrokhi (2014) stated that memory will stays longer and easily proceeded and it
will make the students more active and receptive in learning which maximize the
learning process.
The activities provided by the researcher on this research were to make the
students practice the jazz chant multiple times. The repetitive nature if this
technique was expected to help the students remember the sentence structure
which will help them later on the elaboration part of the lesson where the teacher
teach them about the tenses. Foster (2006) also supports this on his article who
stated that music helps learners memorize words even sentences.
Another proves that shows that the students enjoy the learning process
more is based on the questionnaire distributed by the researcher in the end of the
cycle two. It can be said that most of the students feel that they enjoy the lesson
more and they like the jazz chant technique proposed by the researcher. It might
be unfamiliar in the beginning but the students gradually enjoying the activities
prepared by the researcher. Some of the students also stated that it helps them to
learn better since they can memorize the grammar faster in the more joyful way
rather than the conventional teaching.
This is supported by Zhang (2011) on his research which stated that
listening and speaking are probably the most important skills a person needs to be
able to communicate and also the first ones to be obtained either in learning the
mother tongue or any foreign language. Moreover, in order to be able
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communicate students need to use the right structure and have a good
pronunciation.

Teacher’s Opinion
Based on the English teacher opinion, she stated that technique was very
flexible. The verb and subject used in the jazz chant can be changed so that it can
be used to teach different tenses. Afif (2015) which stated the same thing on his
research also supports this. The English teacher and Afif (2015) both agreed that
this flexibility of jazz chant allowed teacher to use it on many kinds of material.
However, of course jazz chant could only be used as complimentary material. It is
due to its nature as a versatile technique, where this technique cannot be used as
the main technique to teach but it has to be used as compliment to other technique.
Another research had been done by Zhang (2011) from Chuzhou University. This
researcher stated that by using jazz chants, which one of the media of teaching
using music and rhythm, are very entertaining and enjoyable. However, he
suggested that this activity is used as an additional material, because there are still
many activities that can be used to teach foreign language.
Unfortunately, there were some weaknesses noticed by both the English
teacher and the researcher. The English teacher stated that the way of repeating
the jazz chant was good, but she gave an addition that the result will be better if
all the students could be more committed to the learning process. This research
was done outside the school hour, which is why the students seem to have
difficulties to be fully committed on the learning. The conduciveness of the
students is one of the factors that influence the success of this research. The other
weakness was from students opinion which stated that the jazz chant used by the
teacher lack on the creative area. Actually, this is cannot be avoided because every
teacher has their own capacity in producing a media. The English teacher herself
also stated that jazz chant might be hard to develop, but this is can be solved by
looking for more example of jazz chants which are provided a lot in the internet.
Alternatively, the teacher can use the jazz chant made by Graham (2006) as the
founder of jazz chant since there are many edition and many jazz chant provided
on every edition rather than making it by their selves.
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CONCLUSIONS
In this study, the researcher was focusing on improving students’ grammar
mastery especially simple present tense by using jazz chant. The problem of
understanding the grammar itself was found during the researcher’s internship in
the SMPN 6 Malang. In order to improve students’ grammar mastery, it had been
proven that jazz chant could improve students’ grammar mastery after two cycles.
Most of the students also agreed that jazz chant made them enjoy the
lesson more and motivated them to learn grammar better. The English teacher also
stated that the technique was flexible even though it needed a lot of preparation
beforehand. It is also a good technique since it requires a lot of practice and can be
practiced in various ways, depending on the jazz chant texts and the creativity of
the teacher.
There were some weaknesses discovered on this technique after the
implementation. Improving students’ grammar competence using jazz chant need
some follow up activity to make sure the students are aware of what grammar
structure they are learning. That is why the researcher needs to give them some
comprehensive questions as well as some exercises.
In conclusion, jazz chant improved students’ grammar mastery. There had
been improvement after the implementation of jazz chant on students’ grammar
mastery especially on simple present tense after two cycles.

SUGGESTIONS
In order to improve students’ grammar mastery, it is suggested for the
teacher to use jazz chant as a complimentary activity. The teacher should use it
only as complement to other technique. If the teacher has difficulty in making jazz
chant him/herself, the teacher can look for appropriate jazz chant that match with
the material the teacher want to teach in Youtube or Google.
Based on the study that had been done, it is also suggested for the teacher
to come up with a good way to elaborate the jazz chant and the material they want
to teach so the students get the clear idea of what they are learning and why they
learn it through jazz chant. In addition, the teacher also need to prepare exercises
for the students to make sure that they understand what they have learned. The
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English teacher also has to be aware that the activity of jazz chant could make the
students out of track and noisy in class, so the English teacher has to make sure to
come up with a way to keep the students cooperative.
The way of the teacher representing the jazz chant is also important. Jazz
chant is supposed to be enjoyable for the students, so that they can learn through it
better. So it is suggested for the future researcher to not only make the students
repeat the jazz chant or make a more enjoyable topic for jazz chant but also to
look for a more engaging way to teach it. The teacher could include some
movement and more exciting way to teach the jazz chant.
Further researcher are recommended to use jazz chant on different grades
and levels of education, also to improve different skill like what the researcher
have stated before such as vocabulary, pronunciation and intonation and also
listening and speaking.
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Latief, Adnan. 2014. Research Methods on Language Learning an Introduction.
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Bagaric, Vesna & Djigunovic, Jelena. 2007. Defining Communicative
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23 June 2017.
Lock, Graham. 1996. Functional English Grammar: An Introduction for Second
Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcel, Claude. 1853. Language as a Means of Mental Culture and International
Communication. London: Bradbury and Evans, Printers, White friars.
Hinkel, Eli. and Fotos, S.. 2002. New Perspectives On Grammar Teaching in
Second Language Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Graham, Caroline. 2004. Let’s Chant Let’s Sing 4. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Graham, Caroline. 2006. Creating chants and Songs. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dale, Edgar. 1946. Audio-visual Methods in Teaching. Dryden Press.
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Afif, Naufal. 2015. Improving 7th grade students' speaking skill by using Jazz
Chant in SMPN 9 Malang. Malang: Fakultas Sastra Universitas Negeri
Malang.
Zhang, J. 2011. Jazz Chant in English Language Teaching. Academy Publisher,
(5): 563-565.
Peralta, Maribel & Quito, Guadalupe. 2010. The use of Jazz Chants for Children
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