Music is life. That’s why our hearts have beats. Music motivates. People listen to music for pleasure. Teachers have for a long time recognized that they can use songs to motivate students and provide variety in a lesson. Variety is especially important for younger students, who often have very little motivation for entering a language classroom. So, we often have to be very resourceful in the techniques we use.
Songs can be considered valuable pedagogical tools. Songs are a fantastic way to help students work on different elements of language learning. Music offers loads of benefits to language learners. Teachers can use songs to open or close their lessons, to illustrate themes or topics, to add variety or a change of pace, present new vocabulary or recycle known language. Using songs can help learners improve their listening skills (e.g. warm –up work can provide a basis for students to make predictions before listening) and pronunciation, they can also be useful for teaching vocabulary and sentence structure. Students can be asked to do gap-fills, transformations, pronunciation drills and so on, using the lyrics.
The process of selecting a song is one of the most difficult aspect of using music in a lesson. I carefully examine what I want to teach in that lesson. For example, you might wish to use the song in question to exemplify a particular verb tense(Present Perfect Simple-U2-I still haven’t found what I ‘m looking for…). Secondly, I think about the language level of my class. The language level will decide not only which songs you can use, but also what other activities , you will use to develop the lesson. For teenagers, teachers may use what is ‘’cool’’ in the charts.
Teenagers seem to know an endless number of songs by heart and share them continuously through the internet and portable music players. Songs provide a great opportunity for children to interact, to clap their hands or dance.
The great thing about the music is that you can sing along. A good song can be enjoyed again and again, which means students can continue to sing along outside the class for continual learning. Since many popular songs are quite catchy, it might get stuck in their head, leaving them no choice but to learn the lyrics.
You may ask some questions about the title of the song and then listen the song. Listen to the song again, this time with lyrics. Students can possibly highlight unknown words for later discussion. You can make a lyric worksheet as a gap fill and students fill in the gaps as they listen.
I once used ‘’You’re so vain’’ by Carly Simon to introduce a text that looked at vain people or “We are the champions”-Queen. Here are a couple of examples you can ask:”What is a champion?”, “What kinds of champions are there in the world?’’, ”What activities have champions?”,”What do you think are some of the greatest problems facing champions?”.Such questions tend to work really well as conversation starters. Then , creativity is an important part of maintaining motivation and interest. You may also try:
a. A song tends to give the perspective of the singer. Write a response (a paragraph) from the point of view of the person the song is being sung about, or any other protagonist.
b. Write a diary entry for a character in the song. Get learners to examine the thoughts and feelings that inspired the story being played out in the lyrics.
Songs can provide topics for discussion and extension activities, for grammar structures. For example:
- Future Simple-Beatles-All my Loving
- Gerunds-Beatles-Across the Universe
- Subjunctive-Beyonce-If I were a boy
- Modal Verbs-can-R. Kelly-I believe I can fly ;must-Madness-It must be love
- Similes-Lenka-Everything at once
- Pollution, Environmental Issues, Earth Day-Michael Jackson-Heal the world
- Days of the week-The cure-Friday I’m in love
- Disappointment-Tracy Chapman-Give me a reason to stay
- Friendship-Aura Dione-Friends
Music will help learners to become familiar with word stress and intonation, and the rhythm with which words are spoken or sung, also helps memorization. From my own experience I know the power of music, and I am aware of what it does to my mind and memory, yet I don’t think I should expect the same effect on everyone.
In conclusion, I believe that while music enriches my soul, teaching enriches my spirit. It is obvious that music has some kind of power, which can help ‘’recharge’’ our minds. Songs have an important role in the classroom for helping create that friendly and co-operative atmosphere ,so important for language learning.
Bibliography
Lems Kirsten,Using Music in the Adult ESL Classroom, ERIC Digest, 2001
www.nafme.org-20 important benefits of music in our schools-July 21,2014