Using songs and games in tdag

Using songs and games in TDAG
It is not a fallacy to assert that songs and games are one of the most charming and ethnically prosperous resources that the teachers of the fourth form can easily use in verbal communication classrooms. Songs propose a change from habitual classroom actions. They are valuable resources to expand students' abilities in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They can also be exercises to teach a variety of language matters such as sentence patterns, vocabulary, pronunciation, rhythm, adjectives, and adverbs.

Learning English in the course of songs also affords a non-threatening ambiance for students, who usually are tense when speaking English in an official classroom location. Songs also give new insights into the objective traditions. According to Wilgo M Rivers they are the means in the course of which educational topics are presented successfully.

While they supply genuine texts, they are inspiring. Prosodic features of the language such as stress, rhythm, intonation are presented through songs, thus from side to side using them the language, which is cut up into sequences of structural points, becomes an entire once more. There are many advantages of using songs in the classroom. Through using modern trendy songs, which youngsters well know, the teacher of the fourth form can meet the challenges of the students needs in the classroom. Because songs are extremely unforgettable and motivating, in many forms they may comprise an influential subculture with their own rituals. Furthermore, through using customary folk songs the support of the learners' knowledge of the target culture can be broadened. Appropriately, chosen traditional folk songs have the twofold encouraging assault of beautiful tunes and appealing stories, in addition for many students- the added component of originality. Most songs, especially folk songs, go after a frequently repetitive verse form, with rhyme, and have a series of other discourse features, which make them easy to follow. In consequence, if preferred appropriately and adopted cautiously, a teacher should benefit from songs in all phases of teaching grammar.
Songs may both be used for the presentation or the perform phase of the grammar class. They may support widespread and concentrated listening, and inspire resourcefulness and use of imagination in an undisturbed classroom ambiance. Whereas selecting a song the teacher should take the age, interests of the learners and the language being used in the song into deliberation. To improve the fourth form students' commitment, it is also advantageous to allow learners to take part in the selection of the songs. The latest concern of the foreign language teachers is to make the students use the language communicatively. After the realization of communicative competence, activities, or techniques that are task-oriented and that guide students to use the language imaginatively have gained significance. Games and problem-solving activities, which are task-based and have a purpose beyond the production of accurate speech, are the examples of the most preferable communicative activities. Such activities highlight not only the competence but also the performance of the learner. Nonetheless, they are the indispensable parts of a grammar lesson, since they reinforce a form-discourse match. In such activities, the attention is on the discourse context. Both games and problem-solving activities have a purpose.
Games are organized according to rules, and they are enjoyable. Most games require choral responses or group works, whereas problem-solving activities (though they are structured) require individual response and creative solutions. Games and problem-solving activities are generally used after the presentation, in the practice part, because such communicative tasks can only be handled after mastering sufficient grammar and lexical points. Through well-planned games, learners can put into practice and internalize vocabulary, grammar, and structures extensively. Play and competition that are provided by games enhance the motivation of the young learners. They also reduce the stress in the classroom as Krasen S.D suggested. At the same time as playing games, the learners' attention is on the message, not on the language. For teachers, using the game-based platform in class is sometimes a real challenge. In the 5th form class, pupils are understood by teachers to be working on learning the language, but they are also to some extent understood to be exercising their out of school identities as players and gamers while interacting with the platform, and thereby bringing unsolicited and unwanted entertainment into the classroom. On the one hand so many teachers in the fourth form acknowledge that gaming, including the Pacman activity could facilitate vocabulary acquisition and spelling, on the other hand the role of the teacher is often to slow down the pace of playing and interacting and to encourage pupils to concentrate, repeat and persist. Often teachers would insist, when they are guiding or supervising individual pupils, that pupils should engage in introductions to tasks and other kinds of preparatory work that students were more likely to skip in order to move on to `real' task interaction. In this sense teachers were trying to reconceptualise gaming as a profound or `serious' learning activity based on concentration and perseverance, in which a linear process of solving and understanding tasks should generally be observed.

In the 4th form classroom gaming is from the beginning conceptualised as a learning activity by the teacher which allow the students to understand gaming as a teacher controlled activity from the outset. In the 4th form class where the teacher has pre-selected the tasks, pupils are much more likely to work through the tasks and to do this in the order suggested by the teacher, though a number of the students also choose to do the tasks in the order that seem interesting to them. The attention span of these students is generally longer than that of the 5th formers, also their pace of learning and interacting with the platform was much more relaxed than the 5th formers, who would typically move quickly through the tasks, and often skip from the platform menu to individual tasks as described above. Whereas it may be argued that these differences in attention span and platform response could be due to age differences, 4th formers are also observed to prefer the most playful tasks and to have little patience with tasks that were too `bookish'. In addition to this, some 4th formers would do `entertaining' tasks (for instance the Pacman task) that they were not asked to do, in these cases the teacher said that they we allow to work on tasks of their own choice when they had finished what they had been asked to do. Gaming in this sense often worked as a reward after `learning'. Research, Reflections and Innovations in Integrating ICT in Education

Game-based language learning has for instance supported fluency and Research, Reflections and Innovations in Integrating ICT in Education715 communicative competence by letting learners simulate or play real life situations, drama or narrative. In addition to this puzzles and minigames such as Hangman have been used to enhance vocabulary acquisition and use. In this sense games have been associated with a move from the teaching of discrete grammatical structures to the promotion of communicative ability . Although games may serve to proceduralise foreign language knowledge, i.e. to encourage and support fluency against the generally rule-based, declarative approach to foreign language teaching. In moving from declarative to procedural knowledge game-based language learning may serve to provide practice as well as a basis for the repetition of grammatical structures in the foreign language.
Use of these techniques in the classroom is vital because of their powerful impact upon students' learning. For example, several studies have shown that students prefer strategies promoting active learning to traditional lectures. Other research studies evaluating students' achievement have demonstrated that many strategies promoting active learning are comparable to lectures in promoting the mastery of content but superior to lectures in promoting the development of students' skills in thinking and writing. Then, one has to acknowledge that songs and games are the best ways to enhance students interest incommunicative learning as Hadfield J (1984) put. Further, some cognitive research has shown that a significant number of individuals have learning styles best served by pedagogical techniques other than lecturing. Therefore, a thoughtful and scholarly approach to skilful teaching requires that faculty become knowledgeable about the many ways strategies promoting active learning have been successfully used across the disciplines. Further, each faculty member should engage in self-reflection, exploring his or her personal willingness to experiment with alternative approaches to instruction