Chapter II: Review of the Literature

This review of literature will describe research on jazz chants, jazz chants instructions, and the
effect of the jazz chants on students vocabulary.
Cultivating students L2 speaking competence
Accent of a speaker is ordinarily depicted by a description of probouciation of each patented
sound, the placement of stress and of rhythm and intonations ; it is worth considering using the
teaching materials that are affiliated to these aspects and could address ESL/EFL learners needs
(Esling & Wong , 1983).Chen, Fan & Lin (1995) suggest that language teachers expend more
time working on individual sounds by teaching English rhythms as they may find a surprising
progress in students English Pronunciations. Chen, Fan & Lin (1995), says that Chinese EFL
students tend to have difficulties differentiating sentence rhythms, stress and syllable grouping.
According to Kung (2012), most of the Taiwan students tend to stress every word and make it
sound as if they were speaking Chinese when they speak English. Instructions could be time
consuming and unproductive if learners do not get sufficient practice for stress and syllable
grouping, Shih (1999). According to Grant (1993), when these happens, most of the EFL/ESL
learners tend to sound blunt , furious , obstinate or antsy without aspiring to. As said by Shih
(1999) ,one more typical dilemma is that students in Taiwan tend to pronounce words separately
with unsystematic and unwanted pauses which results in them sound choppy and fake .Browne
and Huckin (1987) and Grant (1993) also mention that such overuse and misuse of stress could
make students speech rhythms difficult to comprehend.

Incorporating Jazz into Taiwanese EFL settings

According to Pennington & Richards , (1986) , to teach L2 speaking skills effectively, many
language teacher have noted the use of Carolyn Grahams Jazz Chants in many ESL classrooms. Jazz
Chant is a rhythmic expression of spoken American English composed and proposed by Graham
(1978) for ESL students to improve their speaking skills. It was modeled to increase learners
awareness of the sound system, which reflects the rhythms of traditional American Jazz proposed by
Graham (1978).In a classroom, teachers would embolden the students to take part in communicative
activities revolving on the sound system with rehearsing dialogues (Graham,1978).According to
Graham (1978), there are a few advantages of suing Jazz Chants to improve syllable stresses and
intonations. The first advantage would be the fact that it could be used as a warm-up activity for
students to get ready and to be prepared for the class. Secondly, the speed of the chants is at a natural
to go slightly fast rate that pushes learners further from their prevalent fossilized pronunciations.
Next, it is an opportunity for teachers to identify students problem when it is used as a dictation
activity, Huber (1994).With all these advantages as pointed above, its voguishness has ascent around
the world to foster ESL students speaking competence (Pennington & Richards, 1986) .For instance
as mentioned by Arima and Sato (2008) , Jazz Chants have been used as a important approach to
familiarizing students with English sounds and rhythms in Asia staring from 2002.In addition to
that ,the testing of the aftermath of pausing, stress and intonation on the apprehensibility of nonnative English speech has prompted language teachers and materials inventors to contrive various
techniques to incorporate suprasegmental practice into classrooms (Tanner & Landon , 2009).

Jazz chants usage provides criterion of stress and intonation which are included in the element of the
prosodic or suprasgemental domain which can be used together with the related coarticulatory
phenomena of the mixing and overlie of sounds in fluent speech (Pennington &
Rchards,1986).According to Huber (1994) ,this results in the affect of relative levels of stress and
pitch within the syllables, words, phrases and longer stretches of speech can be pronounced better.
Moreover, other oral techniques have been promoted to improve learners use of prosodic qualities
such as mirroring , tracking and shadowing native speakers discourse modules (Celce-Murcia,
Brinton & Goodwin , (1996).In the contemporary ,according to Richman, (2005), as few of the
earliest techniques, Jazz Chants have been used by teachers continuously to have their students chant
poems and songs in order for the students to be sensible about English rhythms, stress and intonation.
As what is suggested by Pennington and Richards (1986) and Graham (1978) the favor of suing Jazz
Chants in many ELS context is expanding, there still few downside of using Jazz Chants that is been
identified from experimental studies. These includes the fact that it is quite hard for teachers to get to
know each student in different classes as the focus in placed on sound and rhythms; students are at
times required to exclusively what they have just heard during this practice (Berry
&Williams,1992).In addition to that, the more proficient learners could conquer the class as they are
more conscious of the sound system, thus this leads to dispiritness and thwart at the beginning of the
instruction (Tanner & Landon , 2009).
As what have been discussed above, it is vital that the pros and cons of Jazz Chants have been
identified in the field of ELT.