Most children enjoy singing songs, and they can often be a welcome change from the routine
of learning a foreign language. For the teacher, using songs in the classroom can also be a nice
break from following a set curriculum. Songs can be taught to any number of students and
even those teachers with the most limited resources can use them effectively. Songs can play
an important role in the development of language in young children learning a second
language. Yet songs may be used relatively ineffectively and the potential for language
learning is not maximized.
This paper starts by analyzing why songs should be considered as useful pedagogical tools.
The author then proposes using songs as language learning tasks to maximize the benefits of
using songs and attempts to show how this might be done using practical examples. Finally,
the paper explores how classic children’s songs could be modified to help teachers use them
more frequently to teach a wider variety of topics.