Every TEFL teacher worth his salt knows that students of all ages love listening to songs in class. And we all know that in 3 minutes we can download the lyrics for any song and make a gap-fill that will eat a good twenty minutes of class time. With minimal thought anyone can find a song with at least a tangential connection to whatever he happens to be teaching. The Barenaked Ladies' If I Had A Million Dollars ties in nicely with the second conditional and Madonna's Holiday practically screams New Headway 3rd Edition.
The question then, for the motivated teacher, is how to get more educational value out of music?
1. TPR with Music for Beginners
Teaching beginners is tiring. Even the most creative teachers quickly run out of ways to make learning have got and my name is student-centered and communicative experiences. When I first started teaching beginners I searched and searched for ways that I could use music in my lessons. I needed something to take the monotony out of the seemingly endless stream of completely unauthentic dialogues, questionnaires and worksheets I was giving my students. That, plus I needed a way to get the 36 eyeballs in my classroom to look at something other than me.
Beginners need support and a rubric to work from. So start with something simple and build slowly. At the same time, it's important that you don't insult your students' intelligence. While Sesame Street's Hola Means Hello recycles the key vocabulary your students need to know, forcing a room full of adults to listen to Grover and the Toddler Choir may be a little discouraging.
Instead, the Beatles' Hello, Goodbye. The lyrics are simple "you say goodbye and I say hello / Hello, hello..." the melody is catchy and it appeals to students of all stripes. Start by making a gap-fill activity. Try to draw your students' attention to a half-dozen key words by removing them whenever they appear in the lyrics. Writing the missing words at the bottom of the page is a good way to help students with weaker listening skills and reinforce spelling. Listen to the song a couple times in class and make sure that all of the students have filled in the missing words.
Print the key words and phrases from the song (hello, goodbye, go, I, you, why, say, bye, oh no, I don't know) in big letters individually on sheets of coloured paper. Give each group of 3-4 students a set of all the words and phrases and to spread out on their desks.
Play the song again. This time, whenever your students hear a word in the song that matches a printed on one of the sheets in front of them, they need to hold that paper up over their heads. This is a really fun, activity that gets the whole class laughing and singing along.
2. Guessing Vocabulary Definitions from Context with Music
The great thing about using music in class is that whatever the topic you're teaching, you can be sure that someone, somewhere once wrote a song about it. With a little effort, you can find a song to match any lexical set. Start with a quick pre-listening activity to set the context. Put your students in small groups and give each group a series of pictures that represent key words from the song. Some of the pictures should be easy to interpret, while others could be a little more abstract.
For example, if I were to play Stairway to Heaven in my class, I'd give my students about dozen pictures, including a staircase (obviously to represent the stairway) and a shining star (to represent "all that glitters"). Each group would then have a few minutes to discuss the connection between the images and write down what they thought the song might be about.
Then, distribute a cloze activity. Rather than omitting the words represented by the pictures, put them in bold and leave out other words. Listen to the the song a couple of times and make sure that your students have filled in all the gaps.
Put them back in groups and have them look at the pictures again. This time they need to use the context of the song to figure out which pictures represent which words. Encourage them to be creative and explain their answers.
Good stuff Kristian!
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I started reading Point 1 about beginners I thought of 'Hello, Goodbye' - I sometimes use that song as well - good for some simple opposites (stop:go yes:no high:low etc).
In Point 2, I also like your idea of pre-teaching vocab, then deleting everything EXCEPT THOSE WORDS. It has never occured to me to do that! - an extremely simple way to mess with their heads a bit.
One of the simplest first listening tasks is 'word bingo' - I usually write words on small pieces of paper - some in the song and some not (but they SOUND like they could be). Students just listen out for which words are and aren't in the song. A bit of feedback to get the class together, then listen again, then give out the tapescript for them to check (perhaps with gaps for them to fill as part of the next task).
I really should use songs far more than I do - seeing as I love music so much, and I know just how libguistically useful listening to Italian songs has been for me over the past few years.
Songs are a great way to change the energy levels in a class - and they really memorable too. There must be one for every EFL occasion - I used to use UB40 Only to be with you for present perfect I remember - that was back in the days of cassettes though - much easier now with mp3s.
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