Graham Carolyn. Small Talk. More Jazz Chants

Textbook for foreign speakers. — Oxford University Press, 1978. — 86 p.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 American English. Her first book, Jazz Chants, was published in 1978, followed by "Jazz Chants for Children one year later. For over 25 years, classes all over the world have enjoyed jazz chanting as a unique way for students to improve their speaking and listening comprehension skills while reinforcing the language structures of everyday situations. Grammarchants is a lively review of basic American-English grammatical structures. Each unit opens with a formal "grammarchant, " which presents a basic aspect of grammar. This is followed by a series of related chants and songs that practice and reinforce the grammatical structure presented in the grammar chant. Each unit also contains special listening and speaking exercises. An Answer Key is included. A CD features all of the songs and chants from the book.American English stretches, shortens, blends, and often drops sounds. These subtle features of the language are extremely difficult for a student to comprehend unless his ear has been properly trained to understand the language of an educated native speaker in natural conversation. The sound of Jeet yet? is meaningless unless one has acquired the listening comprehension skills necessary to make the connection with Did you eat yet? Another example of the blending of sounds is I`m going to (go), reduced to I`m gonna (go). Students should be aware the written world gonna would be considered nonstandard English whereas the spoken form is perfectly acceptable in the American conversation.
A comparison of the text of Small Talk and its cassette helps to illustrate this striking difference between the written word and its spoken form. Jazz chants are particularly useful in developing these listening comprehension skills.