The Little Red Hen: Spotlight on the Creator of Jazz Chants

     The creator of Jazz Chant is none other than Carolyn Graham, who will be one of the featured speakers in International Conference on English Language Teaching (ICELT) 2009 at Hotel Equatorial Melaka. Carolyn Graham is the creator of numerous English language teaching books, most notably Jazz Chants and Let's Sing, Let's Chant, published by Oxford University Press. She developed the technique of jazz chanting through her experience teaching ESL at New York University. She has also taught at Harvard and at Teacher's College of Columbia University.
     Jazz Chants are Carolyn Graham's snappy, upbeat chants and poems that use jazz rhythms to illustrate the natural stress and intonation patterns of conversational English. Jazz Chants provide an innovative and exciting way to improve student's speaking and listening comprehension skills while reinforcing the language structures of everyday situations.
     The video below is an example of how a jazz chant is recited. There are countless others on the YouTube, some very interesting ones are done by students and young children. 'The Little Red Hen' is one of Carolyn Graham's most famous Jazz Chant.
     Teachers who are interested to use Jazz Chant in the classroom may make full use of the various wonderful resources online. My favourite would be the Onestopenglish, where numerous Jazz Chants in MP3 form can be downloaded for free.