Why to Teach English Through Songs?
Learning how to Teach English Through Songs can make a great contribution because music connect all cultures and languages. This makes it one of the best and most motivating resources in the classroom, regardless of the age or background of the learner.
How to Teach English Through Songs
These are some of the common ways to teach English through songs
1. Fill in the Blanks: One of the activities that most of teacher use with songs is deleting some of the words from the lyrics, they ask students to listen and fill in the blanks. An important aspect that you have to take into account is that deleted words must mean something to students. They could be all verbs, adjectives or vocabulary related to a particular topic.
2. Fill in the Blanks to Teach Phonetics: This activity is similar to the previous one, the only difference is that this time you will give a little bit of help because they will see the phonetic transcription in the parenthesis.
3. Word Classification: For this activity, you have to find a song which has the vowel or diphthong sound that you want to teach. You give the lyrics to students and ask them to recognize words that have the vowel or diphthong sound you want to focus on.
4: Dialogue Creation: For this activity, you have to give students the lyrics, you can play it once and then ask students to highlight some key phrases and then you have to ask them to create a dialogue using those phrases. That should make students thinks.
5: Line Ordering: Give students lines from the lyrics and ask them to number them as they listen to the song. You can also give a line to each student in a group and ask them to order the lyrics according to the song.
6: Synonyms and Antonyms: This is similar to the Fill in the Blanks activity but this time, the help you give to your students is a synonym or an antonym in the parenthesis.
7: Grammar Tasks: Last but not least, grammar can be introduced using songs, you can take examples from songs, you can ask students to change sentences from active to passive voice or change sentences from present to past.
Additional Resources
These are some additional resources that you can try with your students. These tools will help complement the work that you do in the classroom.
MusixMatch
If you think that students are really interested in using songs to learn English, recommend one of the best apps that an English language learner should have. MusixMatch is the world’s largest catalog of song lyrics and translations.
Lyrics Training
LyricsTraining is an easy and fun way to learn and improve your foreign languages skills, through the music videos and the lyrics of your favorite songs.
LyricsTraining is available for Android and IOS Devices
There are more apps where MusixMatch came from, consider visiting and recommending these apps that every language learner should have