Activities+for+Teaching+Songs

** Before class ** Choose a song with lyrics that are suitable for the level of your students. Type out the lyrics. Then replace some of the words with blanks. To make this a language awareness exercise, you might remove a particular class of word (prepositions, adjectives, verbs, etc.). ** In class ** 1. Distribute the song lyrics, one per pair of students. 2. Students read the text for gist, then work in pairs to think of words to fill the blanks. Help them with any words they don’t understand. 3. Play the song. 4. Students listen and check their answers and fill any missing blanks. 5. Collect their answers. For controversial answers, replay the relevant part of the track to resolve any doubt. ** Variation ** · Pre-teach words and phrases that occur in the song. · Instead of removing individual words, remove idiomatic expressions. Put a number in brackets to indicate the number of missing words. · For beginners or elementary learners, include a glossary at the bottom of the handout, containing the missing words and some extra ones. · For beginners or elementary learners, leave as many dashes as there are letters in the missing word. You could also leave in the first letter of the missing word. · Instead of removing words, insert additional ones. Students must listen closely for what they don’t hear. · Don’t add or remove words, but change them. Students must listen closely and change the lyrics back to the original. · Don’t provide a text. Students listen for certain phrases and/or language forms and count the number of times they occur. ** Rationale ** A problem-based, integrated reading and listening activity that is motivating and enjoyable. Can also have a grammatical, lexical and phonological focus. Adapted from Murphey (1992). ** Jumbled Lyrics ** ** Before class ** Choose a song with lyrics that are suitable for the level of your students. Type out the lyrics and cut up the verses, so that you are left with the individual lines of the song. Shuffle the lyrics and place them in an envelope – one envelope per pair of students. ** In class ** 1. Distribute the envelopes – one per pair of students. 2. Students read the lyrics and try to guess a logical order for the lyrics. 3. Collect the students’ guesses and ask them to explain their choices. By asking them to explain, you elicit from students discourse markers in the text, which show the logical relationship between one line of text and another. 4. Play the song, but stop after every second line or so, to enable students to adjust their choices and guess what might come next. 5. Play the song again straight through. Students finalise their choices. 6. Discuss the activity. Focus on key language in the text, e.g., discourse markers, lexis, phonology or grammatical forms. ** Variation ** · Cut the lyrics vertically instead of horizontally, so that students are listening for the end of a line, rather than a subsequent line. This will focus on sentence structure and/or discourse markers at sentence level, rather than text level. · Use the completed text as the basis of a reading activity. ** Rationale ** A problem-based, integrated reading and listening activity that raises awareness of discourse markers, and promotes text-level (rather than word- or sentence-level) comprehension. Can also have a grammatical, lexical and phonological focus. The decision to ask students to explain their choices (in step 2) is an example of //teaching// rather than //testing// reading comprehension. When they have to explain their choices, students’ awareness is drawn to the contextual clues in the text. When this technique is used frequently, it helps students to develop the strategy of using contextual clues to understand text. This can be useful for training learners who have the habit of approaching language purely at word- or sentence-level.
 * Musical Cloze **
 * ** Focus ** || Listening comprehension, reading, and inferring from context.  ||
 * ** Level ** || Any (adapt material to level)  ||
 * ** Time ** || 5-15 minutes  ||
 * ** Resources ** || song with printed lyrics  ||
 * ** Focus ** || Listening comprehension, raising awareness of discourse markers and contextual clues.  ||
 * ** Level ** || Any (adapt material to level)  ||
 * ** Time ** || 15-30 minutes  ||
 * ** Resources ** || song with printed lyrics  ||