The purpose of this research is to examinate the effectiveness of two instructional methods of singing; whole-song method and phrase-by-phrase method. A survey has conducted 117 kindergarten teachers in Busan area concerning their attitudes towards mu...
The purpose of this research is to examinate the effectiveness of two instructional methods of singing; whole-song method and phrase-by-phrase method. A survey has conducted 117 kindergarten teachers in Busan area concerning their attitudes towards music education, teaching method related to songs. The result of this survey, 77.78% of respondents placed their emphasis on teaching songs. Therefore using an effective teaching method related to songs is very vital to achieving the stated objective.
Thirty-six five-old children from two classes in a kindergarten school participated in the experiment in which they were taught two children's songs using were made by children taught by the whole-song method than when taught through the phrase-by-phrase method for both songs.
More specifically, the percentage errors was significantly higher for the last three phrases of the song than the first phrase when using the phrase-by-phrase method. On the other hand, lower and even errors were made across all phrase of the songs when children were taught by the whole-song method. For the all categories of errors (pitch, rhythm, and text), performance errors were more frequently found in the phrase-by-phrase method than the whole-song method and the greatest difference was for pitch.
The result of this study imply that melodic and textual fragmentation of the traditional phrase-by-phrase method may give difficulty to children in recalling and performing of songs by working against the preservation of the musical flow of the songs. The whole-song method, on the contrary, can be a more effective way of song acquisition since the continuity and integrity of the song is more easily transmitted to children. It is recommended that music teachers who stick to the traditional phrase-by-phrase method need to be aware of children's difficulty in recalling from the method and improve their instructional procedures of singing by using different procedures such as the whole-song method.