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Mark Hancock - WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A SONG
Mark Hancock has been involved in TEFL for 15 years,
in Sudan, Turkey,
Brazil and Spain. He holds an Msc in Teaching English from Aston University.
He has written Pronunciation Games (CUP; 1995), Singing Grammar (CUP; 1998)
and co-written Pen Pictures (OUP 1999), Clearways (CUP2000) and Way to Go
(CUP 2001).
He has also agreed to be our guinea pig and answer the Burning Questionnaire, a new addition to our Guest section. So, if you’d like to find out about Mark’s taste in music, and what ‘pushes his buttons’, click on the face below.
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Mark Hancock
Songs can be useful in English lessons. I assume that most readers will agree with this statement, and I will spend no more time trying to justify it. Instead, let’s look at the more specific question: How can songs be useful in English lessons?
Songs are one form of input in the classroom, along with reading passages, listening texts and so on. Any form of input can be exploited in these three general ways:
1. For skills work (listening, reading, speaking, writing).
2. To focus on the language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation).
3. As a source of content matter (characters to discuss, metaphors to interpret, stories to tell...)
When we plan classroom activities with songs, it is good to keep these three aspects in mind in order to fully exploit the potential of the song. It may also help us to keep a clear view of why we are doing the activity. Let me explain this point with an example:
Perhaps the classroom activity most commonly used with songs is gap-filling the lyric. But notice there are different ways of doing this. If we play the tape and ask students to fill the gaps, we are doing a listening for detail activity. If, on the other hand, we ask students to fill the gaps before listening, it is no longer just a listening exercise. We are focusing the students’ attention on grammar and vocabulary. We should plan beforehand which of these (skills work or language focus) we want to achieve, because this will probably affect which of the words we choose to tippex out of the lyric.
However, there are many other ways of using songs apart from gap-filling, and I will devote the rest of the article to giving a few examples. I have classified these according to the categories 1, 2, 3 above.
1. Listening skills work
Picture discussion: Find pictures to illustrate the song. Ask students to describe the pictures and predict what the song is about from them.
Picture-selecting: Show students two or more alternative pictures, magazine photos perhaps, and ask them to say which one best matches the content/mood of the lyric and why.
Note-taking: Ask students to listen to the song and take notes, key words, main characters, main events for example.
Word-spotting: Present some key words from the lyric plus some not in the lyric. Ask students to circle the words they hear, and perhaps order the words which are in the song.
Error-finding: Give students a copy of the lyric with some errors, for example wrong words, extra words or words missing. Ask them to listen and identify the errors.
Sequencing: Give students a copy of the lyrics with the lines in the wrong order or cut into strips. Ask them to listen and put them in the right order.
Questions: Prepare comprehension questions. Ask students to listen and answer the questions.
True or false: Prepare true or false statements about the lyric and ask students to listen and say if they are true.
2. Language focus
Tense-selecting: Erase the verbs and put the infinitive by the gap. Ask students to put the verbs in an appropriate tense. Listen to check.
Error-identifying: Give students a copy of the lyric containing grammatical errors and ask them to correct the errors. Listen to check.
Word-ordering: Give lines from the song with words in a jumbled order. Ask them to order the words and listen to check.
Text-reconstruction: Erase all the words in the lyric or parts of it, and number each gap. Ask students to listen once, then try to reconstruct the text by saying the number and the word they think goes in that gap. Make it easier by giving first letters or specifying the part of speech of the word.
Lexical gaps: Give students a copy of the lyric with gaps. Make sure that it is possible to fill the gaps by looking at the context. Ask them to fill the gaps by guessing, then listen to check.
Sound search: Ask students to search the text for examples of a given sound, or for rhyming words.
Drilling: Ask students to practise pronunciation by repeating certain parts of the lyric. Focus on a particular feature; weak forms; contractions; stress time; liaison.
Singing: Ask students to sing along to the song, or chant the words to the music.
3. Content matter
Diary-writing: Ask students to write diary entries for the characters.
Letters: Ask students to write letters to or from the characters, giving advice for example.
Role-play: Ask students to role-play characters from the song.
Imagining: Ask students to extend the characters, imagining what they look like, do in their free time, would do in given situations and so on.
Summarising: Ask students to summarise the events in the lyric.
Prior events: Ask students to imagine how the characters ended up in that situation.
Reporting: Ask students to rewrite the lyric as a newspaper article.
This article previously appeared in the TESOL Spain newsletter Volume 22, and we should like to thank them for their support.