Introduce Physical Appearance Through Chant: A fun way to enrich Students’ Vocabulary

A Brief About Jazz Chant

American ESL teacher Carolyn Graham (1979), has created many rhymes with rhythms especially designed for English teaching. She calls these "jazz chants". Jazz chants can be used in a primary classroom for a variety of reasons:

• To teach the natural rhythm, stress and intonation of conversational English.
• To recall a grammatical point, i.e., present simple, past simple, pronouns, questions, etc...
• To teach language functions, i.e., asking for information, giving explanations, etc...
• To develop students' listening and speaking skills.
• To create an interesting, relaxing atmosphere that helps students in acquiring the new language.

Presenting Chants

The following steps help in presenting a chant to your students:

• Review the main structure in the chant.
• Chant it to familiarize students with it.
• Say one line at a time and ask students to repeat after you.
• Say the line again, clapping or snapping your fingers where the language is stressed as indicated by the asterisks (*)
• Have students repeat the chant several times with clapping or snapping of fingers.
• Write the chant on the blackboard or a chart.
• Many chants are designed for two groups. For these, divide the class into two groups.

Group A chants the lines on the left. Group B chants lines on the right. In a question-answer chant, for example, Group A would ask the questions and group B answer them.

Sample Jazz Chant

Here is a Jazz Chant script about physical appearance that I wrote. It also available in video.

Language Goals

Basic vocabulary about physical appearance and how to utter it in sentence

Elementary

Hair,hair

I have straight hair

I have black hair

and I have straight black hair

Body, body

I am a tall girl

I am slender

and I am a tall slender girl

Eyes,eyes

I have brown eyes

I have large eyes

and I have large brown eyes

And we are beautiful!

Please click below video to see how the chant applied.