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April 2013

TC Quick Tip: Teaching a Song Effectively in 7 Stepsby Anne Alexander

Audience: All Levels

Songs have long been us ed as an “extra” activity in ESL/EFL clas sroom s. Theyare exceptionally good at imprinting language, im proving pronunciation, andmotivating s tudents. However, songs have been shown to be effective onlywhen they are studied intensively: They have to be learned, not simplyunderstood (Li & Brand, 2009). Here are seven s teps teachers can take to getthe best results, not to mention enjoyment, out of adding music to the

curr iculum.

1. Pick a song your students will actually like.This is not the time to get out your Simon & Garfunkel. Get on Billboard and find something current. Choose asong with lyrics and content that everybody can relate to and feel comfortable with, including you. To illustratethis article, I chose Taylor Swift ’s " We Are Never Ever Getting Ba ck Together ," which at this writing is #15 on theHot 100.

2. Choose a song your students will be able to understand.The singer should enunciate his or her words . Note the amount of slang, as well as the inscrutability of anyidioms and m etaphors. To get a rough idea of text difficulty level, consider pasting the lyrics into an onlinereadability calculator or the one em bedded in Microsoft Word ( instructions for enabling readabili ty statistics inMS Word 10) to get the Flesch-Kincaid score. Ms. Swift’s current hit scores a 72, which means it’s s lightly easier than Reader’s Diges t; Don McLean’s “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” s cores a 53, on par with Time Magazine;Gilbert & Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” clocks in at 27, which is more challengingthan the Harvard Law Review.

3. Use a video with synchronized captioning.Synchronized captioning helps learners understand the lyrics, “chunk” words as collocations or phrases (Li &Brand, 2009), and mem orize songs efficiently. Most popular songs already have em bedded lyrics, but you canadd them to any public video on YouTube ( TestTube > Caption Editor > Try it out). Alternatively, you can createyour own captioned video with Windows Movie Maker.

4. Slow down the playback speed of the video.Students can pick out individual words more easi ly if they can s low the video down to half speed without tonaldistortion. This is snap to do for any noncommercial version of the song on YouTube (TestTube > HTML 5 Video> Try it out).

5. Provide another way to hear the correct pronunciation of the lyrics. Use Google SpeakIt! or similar free text-to-speech software. If your institution has voice pattern recognitionsoftware, by all m eans, use it.

6. Require your students to memorize the song.Design activities that directly support learning the song: gap exercises , writing prompts—you know what to do.

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Spread the teaching process over an extended time to increase retention (Li & Brand, 2009). Treating the s onglike a real ass ignment will generate buy-in from m ore serious students who might otherwise cons ider it afrivolous activity (Li & Brand).

7. Reward students.Once your s tudents have memorized the song, reward them with an uncaptioned version that has a s timulatingvisual track. Your students will feel the pres tige of being able to watch a cool, popular video unas sis ted, just likefluent speakers.

References

Li, X., & Brand, M. (2009). Effectiveness of music on vocabulary acquisition, language usage, and meaning for mainland Chinese ESL learners. Contributions to Music Education, 36 (1), 73–84.

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Anne Alexander is a graduate student in the TESOL program at CSU Fullerton. She is conducting a 2-year self-experiment to measure how much Japanese she can learn exclusively through music.