Teaching Songs Disadvantages

2.5.2.3 The purpose of using games in English classroom

Teaching today has changed a lot over the past years. Once it was all about learners being passive and listening in the classroom, but today learners are usually much more active in the classroom, and what better way to be active than by playing games (Steve Sugar.1998.p. 3).

The Rwandan national curriculum (Competence Based Curriculum) in foreign languages talks about the importance of keeping teaching methods diverse in order to light and sustain interest amongst students.

Teachers can help sustain diversity in a variety of ways, for example by using activities that require students to be creative in thinking and by emphasizing individual learning and cooperative learning equally. A

Yet, using songs in a foreign language classroom may bring at the same time both advantages and disadvantages. As for advantages, Murphey (1990:146) highilights the following advantages:

 The main reason is the good atmosphere they create in the classroom. Students relate to songs as part of entertainment rather than work and find learning vocabulary through songs amusing rather than tedious.

 Better familiality with songs improves students’ status with the peer group and the students identity with the singers and want to understand the words.

 They are enjoyable and therefore memorable

 They are often a welcome change from the routine of classroom activety in learning a language.

 They encourage students to take an active part in the learning process. Therefore, they become more confident in their learning ability and more motivated about learning the

2.5.4. Role-playing and simulation in language learning

Within the framework of language learning, there are other oral materials which consolidate oral communication. These are role-playing and simulation. With regard to their importance, Johnson and Mellow (1981:126) argue that

Among classroom activities, role-playing and simulation used at a highly rate, are suitable vehicles to use in a communicative approach to language learning.

The terms role-playing and simulation, however, have been interpreted in many different ways by teachers and textbook writers.Trying to make the distinction between role-playing and simulation, Krashen (1981:31) defines simulation as “a teaching technique in which students act out language using situations with or without preparation”. Whereas role-playing is defined as “an activity, either for teaching or therapeutic purposes in which someone acts out a role in a more or less improvided fashion”. This writer emphasises that role-paying is distinguished from simulation in that people may be asked to act as a person with a different sex, age, or function from their own. On the other hand, simulation is distinguished from role-playing in that simulation students are expected to behave appropriately in the setting but the emphasis is not on the adaptation of different