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Investigating the Utilization of the Song 'Darl+ing' by Seventeen K-Pop Group in Improving English Grammar Skill

Paper · 2023 · Ikrar Genidal Riadil, Pitchaya Chonpracha, Novian Gilang Bujana et al.

Summary

The paper asks whether a K-pop song with English lyrics can help Indonesian senior high school learners practise English grammar, especially verb tenses. The authors use "Darl+ing" by Seventeen (released 15 April 2022). They go through the lyrics line by line and label each line with a grammatical category, using the tense framework from Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar (1989). Categories include present, present progressive and simple future tense, gerund, modal auxiliary, causative and quoted speech. Lines with no clear category are marked "None". They also ran a qualitative questionnaire on how students feel about learning grammar through English songs. Present tense dominates the lyrics, and most students found song-based grammar study enjoyable and helpful. The authors recommend lyrics as an engaging classroom resource. The analysis is shallow, and several labels are doubtful: the vocative "Darling, you" is tagged as a gerund, and "I'ma treat you better" is tagged as present tense. The paper is therefore more useful as a picture of informal lyric English than as a reliable annotation.

Key points

  • Lyric category counts: 29 present tense, 13 gerund, 5 present progressive, 3 modal auxiliary, 3 causative, 2 quoted speech, 1 simple future, 0 infinitive.
  • The method is qualitative: a lyric-by-lyric grammatical labelling plus a yes/no student perception survey.
  • Survey results:
    • 92.9% enjoy English music at home and 85.7% enjoy it in class.
    • 92.9% say songs help them learn grammar, 83.3% find it simple, and 78.6% find it more practical.
    • The abstract reports 76% overall endorsement of lyrics as a teaching tool.
  • 59.5% of students still see disadvantages. A main reason given is that song lyrics are not always grammatical, which confuses learners.
  • The lyrics contain colloquial forms such as "I'ma", "wanna" and "can't wait no more", plus verbless fragments like "911 calling".

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Labelling every line of a short, repetitive text with a grammar category gives a quick "grammar profile" of the text, showing which constructions dominate it.
  • I2. Song lyrics combine contracted futures ("I'ma"), "wanna", negative concord and fragments, making them a compact stress test for informal English.
  • I3. The authors use an explicit "None" label for lines that have no finite clause, such as noun-phrase or participle fragments. They do not force a tense label onto these lines.
  • I4. The paper's own mislabels show that surface "-ing" or "-ling" spotting goes wrong: the noun "darling" and participial adjuncts end up classed as gerunds.
  • I5. Students' objection that lyrics break grammar rules points to the need to separate the register a text uses from the standard grammar being taught.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (answer): A per-text construction profile could help pick fables or school texts at a suitable difficulty for the student readers, and show which constructions a test actually exercises.
  • I2 (tokens): A small lyric-style test set would check that the tokenizer and morphology split "I'ma" and "wanna" correctly and assign future/modal readings instead of plain present tense.
  • I3 (tree): The parser and tense layer should likewise represent verbless fragments ("911 calling", "Darling, you") honestly, as fragments without a finite predicate, and not invent a tense.
  • I4 (learn): Cases like these make good negative controls for evaluation. A tagger or teacher-LLM tier that calls "darling" a gerund is relying on surface heuristics, not on morphology.
  • I5 (frames): Pragmatics could mark non-standard but intentional forms (negative concord, slang futures) as register choices. Downstream answers would then not treat them as errors or as changes in meaning.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of IndonesiaDepok · Indonesia8 works · 589 citations🎓Prince of Songkla UniversitySongkhla · Thailand2 works

Also on the byline: Yarsi University · Politeknik APP Jakarta.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Ikrar Genidal Riadil, Pitchaya Chonpracha, Novian Gilang Bujana and Aqila Gema Nuswantoro. 2023. Investigating the Utilization of the Song 'Darl+ing' by Seventeen K-Pop Group in Improving English Grammar Skill. Indonesian Review of English Education, Linguistics, and Literature 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951

@article{riadil2023investigating,
  title = {{Investigating the Utilization of the Song 'Darl+ing' by Seventeen K-Pop Group in Improving English Grammar Skill}},
  author = {Ikrar Genidal Riadil, Pitchaya Chonpracha, Novian Gilang Bujana and Aqila Gema Nuswantoro},
  journal = {Indonesian Review of English Education, Linguistics, and Literature 1},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951}
}

References

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