4 Songs and music
Songs on recordings, video/DVD or perhaps played on a guitar in the classroom
are often used as a Tiller' activity to change the mood or pace of a lesson. They
sometimes tend to get relegated to the 'Friday afternoon' slot as a sort of reward
for the week's hard work. Fine, but do be aware that songs can also be usefully
integrated into the main flow of your course.
Many coursebooks nowadays include songs that specifically focus on
grammatical or functional items; these may have been selected because of their
content (e.g. Tom's DinerusQS a lot of present progressive) or specially written
and recorded for students of English. Of course, you can also select interesting
authentic songs yourself, with the advantage, perhaps, that they are often more
up-to-date.
Songs can be used in many of the same ways that you might use an ordinary
speech recording. Interesting lyrics and clarity of vocals help to make a song into
appropriate classroom material, and for this reason folk music or a solo singer-
songwriter are often a better bet than a heavy-metal band.
Task 205: Using a pop song in class
Think of a specific pop song. How could you use this song in class with your
students?
Commentary
The section below gives some basic ideas for using songs
Ideas for using songs in class
• Reading or listening comprehension: Use the song text as a normal reading
or listening text with the bonus of hearing it sung afterwards (use the lesson
ideas in Chapter 8, Sections 1 and 2).
• Listen and discuss: Get students to listen to the whole song once or twice,
or to a shorter section. Discuss what happened, reactions, interpretations,
predictions, etc. Printed lyrics could be given out if you wish.
• Gapped text: Give students the lyrics with certain words blanked out. They
have to listen carefully and fill in the missing words. This is, perhaps, the
'classic' way of using songs in class! It's so common that it's a bit of an ELT
cliche. Vary the task usefully by, for example, using the gaps as a pre-listening
exercise, with students predicting what the missing words are.
• Song jumble: Cut the lyrics up into separate lines. In small groups, students
try to work out the original order. When ready, they listen and compare their
guess with the actual song.
• Sing along: The aim is to learn the tune and to get the rhythm well enough to
sing along with the original recording. This can be quite challenging and
requires some careful preparation work on practising stress and rhythm
(probably with spoken rather than sung sentences, perhaps using individual,
mouthed and choral practice). And if you have access to a video machine with
a karaoke recording, the possibilities are limitless!
• Compose: 'Here's the tune - now you write the lyrics.' (Again, an activity that
is quite challenging on stress and rhythm.)
• Matching pictures: 'Here are twenty pictures connected with the song. Listen
and put them in the order in which you hear them in the song.'
• Action movements: Listen to one line at a time. For each line, the students
invent a mimed action, which they teach each other and then all perform.
Regularly replay the song from the beginning for them to recall and do the
relevant actions. After they have done one or two verses, hand out the complete
lyrics; in small groups, the students find movements for the rest of the song. At
the end, all come together to watch a performance of the different versions.
• Dictation: Dictate the chorus or the whole song. Compare with the recording.
• Picture dictation: Decide on a representative picture of something that
happens in the song. Dictate the information about this picture, a line at a time,
to the students who draw (not write) their interpretation. For example, 'The
sun is shining in the sky, there are a lot of people in the street, there is a dark
cloud overhead, it's just starting to rain,' etc. By the time you have finished, a
lot of the essential lexis and phrases from the song will have been circulating,
and the song should be not too difficult to follow.