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TitleJazz Chants for Awareness of English Stress and Rhythm
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

Carolyn Graham started publishing jazz chants in the last 1970's; they gained popularity among English language teachers through the 1980's and 1990's. Jazz chants may be especially useful for helping learners to become more aware of stress and rhythm in English sentences and exclamations.

You can learn to make your own jazz chants, centered around a vocabulary theme, with one of these two videos: https://vimeo.com/8880773 (taught by Carolyn Graham herself) or https://youtu.be/ZXItVqHL_VY. Here is an article with the same steps written out: https://www.teachingvillage.org/2010/05/23/how-to-create-a-jazz-chant/. Find a large, annotated collection of jazz chant resources at http://www.jazz-chants.ru/.

Jazz chants offer natural English, not altered to fit the music, with lots of repetition. This activity has endured in English classrooms for thirty years and is a possible starting point for building awareness of sound systems.

Publishdate2018-10-22 02:15:01