Carolyn Graham is considered the creator of
the jazz chants. She was teaching ESL in New York University during the day and
playing piano and singing old jazz in the night. So she realized that this
music has a very strong one, two, three and four pitch. One night she was
playing in a pub and someone came and told her “cheers, good to see you. You
look wonderful!” and she imagined one, two, three, four. Next day in the
university she asks for a big empty room and she organized a free lesson for
every student who wants to practice the English language with jazz. Jazz chants
just born.
Carolyn Graham develops her chants simply
by listening. You don´t create anything, you just have to listen to the
language all around you. You operate the language that we use every day,
nothing fancy or complicated. Natural spoken English with an awareness of the
rhythm.
It
has a lot of advantages, one of the big ones is that you can work with any size
classroom and you don´t need any equipment, all you need is yourself
It must be real, useful and appropriate language
for each age and you can use it with everybody at any level
Formulas for a vocabulary chant:
Step one: Take a topic, for an instance,
fruits
Step two: Write down ten words related to
the topic
Step three: Separate the words according to
the number of sounds (most of the words are going to be one, two or three
sounds)
Step four: Follow the sound´s pattern 2 – 3
– 1 by picking from the list one word with 2 sounds, another word with 3 sounds
and one more word with 1 sound.
2 sounds: Che-rry
3 sounds: Pine-a-pple
1 sound: Plum
Start with the chant!
Cherry, pineapple, plum
Cherry, pineapple, plum
Cherry, pineapple
Cherry, pineapple
Cherry, pineapple, plum
With that pattern you can write any chant
(animals, food, body parts, etc) and you can add words to the chant, for
example:
Purple cherry, yellow pineapple
Purple cherry, yellow pineapple
Purple cherry, yellow pineapple
And violet plum!
And violet plum!
Jazz chants are an innovative
way to teach spoken English. At the beginning I thought it was just to teach
vocabulary and pronunciation but after this post I realize that you can also learn grammar and structures creating
more complex chants. For example:
May I turn down the air conditioning?
Do you mind if I lower the blind?
Is that alright if I put away this staff?
I don´t mind, I don´t mind, I don´t mind!
Is it alright if I switch off the light?
Do you mind if I close the door?
May I switch off the fun?
Sure, sure, sure!
In this chant the students can learn apart
from vocabulary and pronunciation some structures about how to make a question
in a very polite way.
May I … ?
Do you mind if … ?
Is that alright if … ?
As you can see, you have to play with the
rhythm, that’s why I choose to change the order of the sentence in the second
part of the chant
(1) May I turn down the air
conditioning?
(2) Do you mind if I lower the
blind?
(3) Is it alright if I put away this
staff?
I don´t mind, I don´t mind, I don´t mind!
(3) Is it alright if I switch off
the light?
(2) Do you mind if I close the door?
(1) May I switch off the fun?
Sure, sure, sure!
You can use any content in a jazz chant so you can develop any cross-curricular área.
Here there is a video of an original Carolyn´s chant