---
title: "Investigating the Utilization of the Song 'Darl+ing' by Seventeen"
description: "Categories include present, present progressive and simple future tense, gerund, modal auxiliary, causative and quoted speech. 19 references."
authors: ["Ikrar Genidal Riadil", "Pitchaya Chonpracha", "Novian Gilang Bujana", "Aqila Gema  Nuswantoro"]
year: 2023
venue: "Indonesian Review of English Education, Linguistics, and Literature 1"
source: "https://jurnalfaktarbiyah.iainkediri.ac.id/index.php/ireel/article/view/1951"
doi: "10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951"
licence: "CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Indonesian Review of English Education, Linguistics, and Literature)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/riadil-2023-investigating-utilization-song-darl-ing/"
---
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# Investigating the Utilization of the Song 'Darl+ing' by Seventeen K-Pop Group in Improving English Grammar Skill

**Authors:** Ikrar Genidal Riadil, Pitchaya Chonpracha, Novian Gilang Bujana and Aqila Gema  Nuswantoro · **Year:** 2023 · **Venue:** Indonesian Review of English Education, Linguistics, and Literature 1 · **Licence:** [CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Indonesian Review of English Education, Linguistics, and Literature)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951) · [PDF](https://jurnalfaktarbiyah.iainkediri.ac.id/index.php/ireel/article/download/1951/799) · [DOI 10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951](https://doi.org/10.30762/ireell.v1i2.1951) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4393403327)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## 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
- 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.
- Song lyrics combine contracted futures ("I'ma"), "wanna", negative concord and fragments, making them a compact stress test for informal English.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Indonesia](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-indonesia/) — University, Depok, Indonesia · 8 works · 589 citations
- [Prince of Songkla University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/prince-of-songkla-university/) — University, Songkhla, Thailand · 2 works

Also on the byline: [Yarsi University](https://ror.org/03a8rwx10) · [Politeknik APP Jakarta](https://ror.org/03kn92f86).

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## 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.

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

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## References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*