Vocabulary Acquisition Through Teaching a Story-song In the EFL Classroom

This paper investigates the effect of a story-song on learning English as a second language, in particular on vocabulary acquisition. It looks at why songs in general can be used to give learners indirect and less stressful ways of practising and enhancing a new language. The first and second chapters give a look back to some literature background on this topic. It gives examples of how the music works on the memory and why it can be utilised in learning a second language. It also explains why the choice fell on this particular story-song to use for this research. The third chapter describes the research, which is based on different tests and a writing task carried out in a secondary school in Gyula. It investigates the effect of reading a text on incidental vocabulary acquisition, and points out the difference in enhancing vocabulary measured in two groups, Music and No-Music groups. The last two chapters summarise the results of the tests and task, and conclude that music can boost a greater vocabulary acquisition than only the text. It also makes a reference to the relationship between the knowledge of a word and its use in writing, which would, in fact, need a deeper investigation in future researches.