Songs, Rhymes and Stories as Linguistic Tools for Language Development

From time immemorial, songs, rhymes, and stories have always been part of human society that portray many aspects of the cultural heritage of many people. Thus, they portend to be important devices in educational development, especially in terms of language acquisition. The linguistic features in these three genres of oral literature make it possible for language to be learnt in a very enjoyable, pedagogical and natural manner. This study was carried out to bring out the peculiar linguistic features in children’s oral literature with the aim of describing how songs, rhymes, and stories aid language acquisition and learning. The data for the study are eight (8) songs, seven (7) rhymes, and two (2) stories randomly selected from some English reading materials. Linguistic Stylistic Model and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar formed the bases for the analysis. The findings of the study show that composers of children songs, rhymes and stories strategically deploy language to enhance children’s skills in spellings, pronunciations, identifications of words, and arrangement of words into meaningful sentences. The study concludes that songs, rhymes, and stories are useful tools to introduce children to a language and to make the acquisition and learning of such a language easy with fun, activity and motivation.