Choosing your song

One word of warning – youngsters are increasingly sophisticated and critical and are exposed to all sorts of influences, so choose your song carefully. Repetition is a factor to bear in mind depending on the level of student you are dealing with. If a song has a snappy repetitive refrain, students will probably retain it with ease. Some songs are very serious

and merit discussion of content; others are just a bit of fun. You can use both types of songs in your teaching, just make sure you are clear about what you want to achieve by the end of the lesson.

Exploiting your song

Once you have chosen, what can you do with your song? Here are some ideas for exploiting a song rather just listening and following it through:

• Give students the title of the song and ask them to predict what type of vocabulary they are going to hear.

Ask them what type of song they think it might be;

• Make a transcript of the song then cut it up and jumble up the lines so that they are out of order. Students listen

to the song and simply tick the lines as they hear them;

• Once they have done this, students can try and number the lines as they hear them. You can make this more

or less difficult depending on how long you make the chunks of song;

• Give students a number of symbols that they represent the meaning of the song, but in the wrong order;

• You can use gap fills if you want students to listen out for particular vocabulary or grammatical structures.

Be careful not to have too many gaps too close together as songs move forward fairly rapidly!

• Give students a short list of words and ask them to note down how many times they hear each word;

• Split sentences from the song in half and ask students to match the sentence halves before they listen,

then to check their answers by listening;

• Give students a list of words and ask them to listen for the words that rhyme with those on their list;

• Spot the difference. This activity is best done after the song. Give students a version where some of the vocabulary

is wrong, but makes sense. Ask them to spot the rogue words and to change them back to the correct version

by listening to the song again.

Songs on the Internet

Here is one site where you can get hold of lyrics for English songs:

www.amalgama-lab.com

P.S. This material I found in my university`s notices.