Teaching English Through Songs

Teaching English Through Songs

1. Why Learn English Through Songs and Music?

   • what is it about songs that make them such effective English learning tools?
     • Learn everyday language and colloquial speech
       • The songs contain a lot of vocabulary, phrases and useful expressions since they are intended for the native public.
       • The language used in music is informal and is the most updated
     • Becomefamiliar with the sound of English
       • By listening to the tiredness you learn the pronunciation, the tone and the rhythm of the English words
     • Get English stuck inside your head
       • Being the repetitive phrases of a song helps people to learn them faster
       • The rhythm and sounds have the ability to be recorded in our heads and the fragments that we learn from the songs will be almost impossible to forget.
     • Songs are emotional
       • When something is emotional it is easier to remember since our relationship with music is deep and this is a key that unlocks our emotions
     • Music is an easy habit
       • Sometimes lack of time is what prevents us from learning the language, but the songs do not need to spend too much time because you can take the music wherever it wants you to go.
         • You listen in the car, the kitchen or while taking a bath. And choosing the music you like makes you not bored with it.
     • It works
       • There is scientific evidence that music helps to learn grammar, vocabulary and improve spelling.
     • Music teaches you English culture
       • By listening to English-language music you also learn about their culture

2. How to Learn English Through Songs and Music: 8 Great Tips

   • 8 tips for choosing the right music to learn
     • 1. Go to the right place to find songs
       • The search engines that have the largest libraries the most are YouTube or Vimeo, you can search for any video and some will even be subtitled with English letters.
       • Spotify is fantastic because it has the latest trend and the most popular of the moment
       • FluentU has a great variety of real world videos and has a great variety including movie trailers
         • It is divided into levels from novice to native
     • 2. Select the right songs
       • You must choose songs that you like because if they didn't seem boring to you
       • You must find music that uses the correct type of language, not so difficult or too easy
       • Pop is a good option for beginners since when it comes to love it has a lot of vocabulary and then you can try more genres.
     • 3. Get “scaffolding” and vocab support to digest the lyrics.
       • To avoid trying to discover the lyrics on your own, you can use the following resources
         • Lyrics.com and Smartlyrics.com
           • Extensive library of letters that you can use
         • Music English
           • Collection of youtube videos with subtitles
         • FluentU
           • It has music videos to learn English all the videos on FluentU have subtitles with definitions with examples
     • 4. Study the lyrics and vocab
       • To better learn the vocabulary, divide word by word from the song and try to master each word so that it is part of your vocabulary, you can use a targeting service like Anki
     • 5. Sing along.
       • Sing that helps the mouth adopt new postures to move, adapting to the rhythm of the song.
     • 6. Try to sing from memory.
       • Try to sing the song without using the critics, when you are at this point you will be able to use those words in your daily speech
     • 7. Periodically review.
       • It is recommended if you are already comfortable with one song you can go to the next and after a while go back to the first song. This form is known as "spaced repetition"
     • 8. Find new music that builds on top of what you’ve learned.
       • This step is the most difficult because each song must have a balance between the vocabulary learned and the new one

3. As stated by Lo and Fai Li (1998:8), learning English through songs also provides a non-threatening atmosphere for students, who usually are tense when speaking English in a formal classroom setting.

4. Furthermore, through using traditional folk songs the base of the learners knowledge of the target culture can be broadened. Correctly chosen, traditional folk songs have the dual motivating attack of pretty tunes and interesting stories, plus for many students- the added ingredient of novelty (Hill, 1999:29).

5. There are various ways of using songs in the classroom. The level of the students, the interests and the age of the learners, the grammar point to be studied, and the song itself have determinant roles on the procedure.

   • Apart from them, it mainly depends on the creativity of the teacher.

6. Brisa Amayrani Avila Valdivia