Meaningful Integration of Songs And/Or Their Music Videos in the Lesson Plan with Regard to Linguistic and Communicative Competences
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Meaningful integration of songs and/or their music videos in the lesson plan with regard to linguistic and communicative competences with practical examples Markéta Bilanová Projekt Síť vzdělavatelů učitelů cizích jazyků NEFLT registrační číslo CZ.1.07/2.4.00/31.0074 je součástí IPRM Ústí nad Labem Centrum. Tento projekt je spolufinancován Evropským sociálním fondem a státním rozpočtem České republiky. PREFACE There is no doubt teachers of English make use of songs and music videos (e.g. YouTube) nowadays much more than they used to in the past. In the majority of textbooks and course books, listening activities involving pop or folk songs can be found, which encourages the ones who might still hesitate. Teachers know very well they need motivated students who cooperate in their classrooms and they know that the majority of students in teen age like listening to music on their mobile devices (some are even sitting at desks with their earphones still plugged in their ears not realizing the lesson has already begun). The problem however is that songs are often used just as fillers to change the mood or pace of a lesson or they tend to get relegated to the Friday afternoon slot as a sort of “reward” for the week’s hard work. They are insufficiently and often meaninglessly integrated into the lesson plan with no regard to the topic or aim of the lesson. In my practice as a teacher trainer I have observed many lessons where songs were incorporated but just one typical activity prevailed – the obvious “fill in the gaps according to what you hear”. I often wondered why teachers use this activity as the only suitable one for listening to songs and I have come up with some possibilities like “it is easy to prepare” or “it is least time consuming” etc. but when I really considered all the facts, I found out this is in fact a false precondition in comparison with other activities. So, in this little brochure, apart from the popular “fill in the gaps” exercise that will be mentioned in the chapter concerning the usage of interactive whiteboard, I would like to provide many other suitable examples for classroom or outside classroom listening activities that can be meaningfully incorporated into the lesson plan as the “core” of the lesson and not just a filler. Song activities will be introduced in context and classified firstly according to the amount of necessary equipment or aids and secondly according to the linguistic or communicative competences they should develop. The majority of activities can be used with various age groups and with slight alterations also with students of almost any level. Finally, let me accentuate the importance of accompanying the chosen songs with music videos. The variability of activities which they can provide enhance the probability of successful comprehension and thus nurture inner motivation and active involvement of your students. CONTENTS General rules of incorporating songs into lesson plans 6 1. PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES 6 2. WHILE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES 9 3. POST-LISTENING ACTIVITIES 15 Examples of activities 18 1. ACTIVITIES REQUIRING NO HANDOUTS 18 2. ACTIVITIES REQUIRING HANDOUTS 26 General rules of incorporating songs into lesson plans In this chapter a brief summary of possible activities suitable for work with songs and their lyrics will be provided. Practical examples of lesson plans with particular songs and concrete activities will be shown in the next chapter. Similarly to reading of articles, writing or speaking about a certain topic, even listening to songs in the lesson should involve three main stages: pre-listening, while- listening and post-listening exercises, none of which is of higher importance than the other two. Very often teachers just hand out gapped photocopies of song lyrics and press the play button on their CD players. This is what we want to avoid when trying to incorporate songs into the lesson plan meaningfully. Our aim here is not to “catch a mumbled word”, “fill up time till the end of a lesson” or “listen for pleasure” to a song that has just come up in a textbook or is a recent hit on a local radio. What we want is to shift the responsibility for our students’ learning English onto the students! If we provide them with a meaningful listening activity in the course of our lesson they are likely to listen to the song some more in their own free time (voluntarily!). The positive influence of music and rhythm on memorizing vocabulary or grammatical phrases has already been proven by numerous studies, so there’s no need to explain the benefits of listening to songs and their impact on improving students’ competences. 1. PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES The pre-listening activities include things the students do before they hear the song (a passage, watch the music video). They help them comprehend the most of what they are going to hear. Many students tend to claim they “cannot hear” it, they “have no talent” for languages etc. If they really think so, persuading them otherwise is futile. What you can do, on the other hand, is to provide them with some necessary strategies which can enhance their chances at success. One of the strategies is to let students use their imagination and actively browse their already acquired vocabulary elements they think might be involved in the listening exercise. Examples of pre-listening activities: • Brainstorming – provide students with the title of the song/ first line/ just a few seconds of the music video and ask them to predict phrases that they expect to hear. • Topic guessing – provide students with the first verse/ a few chosen expressions or play the music video without sound that supplies the general visual environment of the song and ask what the song is probably going to be about. Accept all ideas they come up with. • Vocabulary/grammar bingo – choose carefully (in advance and on purpose) certain expressions (12-15) from the first verse of the song and write them on the board. Ask students to choose 9 words and write them in any order, one in each box, onto their bingo cards (a chart 3x3 squares). Ask students to cross out those expressions on their cards which could already be heard while listening. When a student gets a row crossed out (horizontally, vertically or diagonally), they shout ‘bingo’. Variation if the song contains past or present perfect tense: Write infinitives of irregular verbs that appear in the song on the board, ask students to write them down as mentioned above. Give them some time to remember the irregular forms and then play the first verse of the song. If they have the infinitive of the verb that can be heard on their card, they cross it out. The bingo chart might be quickly drawn on a piece of paper if the students are already acquainted with the procedure of the game or photocopied and cut out: • Grasp the meaning – Give students a column with expressions from the song and another one with their definitions. Ask them to match the words with their meaning. More advanced students may be asked to define the words themselves or create meaningful sentences. • Sound matching game – Choose words from the song that can be ordered into three or four groups according to phonemes they contain and ask students to divide them. • Spelling bee – Give students phonetic transcriptions of some of the words and ask them to decipher their spelling. • Choose the correct transcription – Make a list of such words that are difficult to pronounce. Write two different phonetic transcriptions next to each word, one of which should be correct. Ask students to look at the transcriptions and choose the correct one for each word. (This can be used as a while-listening activity for new lexical items well). • Where’s the stress? – Choose or multi-syllable expressions from the song and ask students to mark the stress. • Sentence jumble – Prepare a list of jumbled sentences from the song. Ask students to rearrange the scrambled words to form correct sentences. Students check correctness while listening to the song. Other types of pre-listening activities are based on depicting the story of the song. You may need to use pictures as a visual prompt. There are several different methods of working with the pictures: • Tell a story – Give students a worksheet with pictures depicting several sentences from the song lyrics. Elicit some ideas of what they can see in each picture. Then get them to work in pairs and predict the meaning (name) of the song. This activity is most suitable for interactive whiteboards. A following while-listening activity: put the pictures in chronological order according to what you hear. • Draw a picture – Decide on a representative picture of something that happens in the song. Dictate the information about this picture, a line at a time, to the students who draw (not write) their interpretation. For example, ‘ The sun is shining in the sky, there are a lot of people in the street, there is a dark cloud overhead, it’s just starting to rain,’ etc. By the time you have finished, a lot of essential lexis and phrases from the song will have been circulating, and the song should not be difficult to follow. • Line matching – Choose some of the song lines and divide them into two halves. Cut out strips with the half-lines on them. Students work in pairs or small groups to match the corresponding halves then listen to the song and check • Cross it out – Prepare lyrics with some extra lines/ words. Ask students to read the lyrics and guess which lines do not belong to the song.