Five Ways to Use Songs in the English Classroom

Lessons that put you a class ahead www.tomorrowsclass.com [email protected] +061 0427 340 757

Lesson title: Five Ways To Use Songs In The English Classroom

Skill focus: General Teaching Ideas Length: Whole Lesson Year levels: Years 7-10

Instructions:

Music is now more accessible than ever before. All of our students in our class would profess to be some kind of music fan. So it makes sense that we try to use this as a point of engagement. But how? Here are five ideas:

1. Using song lyrics to teach persuasive language:

Many songs are actually persuasive texts. They are extended appeals for personal or political action. As such, they can be a fun source of material for language analysis activities for older students. For something a bit humorous, we can show students a clip by that paragon of early 90s long hair and shirt ripping fashion bad taste - Michael Bolton. Kids will enjoy the cheesiness of his ‘How am I supposed to live without you’ and can search for examples of: appeals to emotion and fear, use of logic, rhetorical questions and use of facts. The lyrics can be downloaded here and the music clip can be watched on Youtube here - http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=YFood_bTOX4. For a more serious example, students can analyse Pink’s ‘Dear Mr President,’ which is a critique of George Bush’s politics. Students will be able to find lots of examples of attacks, appeals to fear and emotion, rhetorical questions and use of facts. Students can then be challenged to identify their own examples of lyrics that use persuasive language and compare and contrast them. Watch ‘Dear Mr President’ here - http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMS9XVIa00, and download the lyrics here. © Tomorrow’s Class 2014 2. Reading comprehension tasks: What are some song lyrics really about? Reading and writing about song lyrics can be a great way to foster analysis skills. Students can pick a song they are interested in, print out the lyrics and write a summary of what the song is all about. We can give them a model of what we expect first. One song we might begin with is Nirvana’s seminal ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ - the lyrics don’t necessarily make sense, but this frees students up to provide their own interpretation. This song could mean anything - what does it mean to you and why? Download the lyrics here or watch the video here - http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg&ob=av3n.

3. Telling your story:

Like the ballads of the 18th and 19th centuries, modern songs often tell stories. This can be particularly the case with rap - such as Eminem’s ‘8 Mile’ (find the lyrics here - *warning, there is some language in them - and the clip here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApsqJpJju9U) or B.O.B’s ‘Airplanes’ (find the lyrics here and the clip here - http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kn6-c223DUU&ob=av2e). Students will be able to identify and share examples of their own. Using an example as a model, students can create autobiographical songs.

4. Studying poetry:

Song lyrics are a great way of studying poetry - since they are usually filled with rhyming couplets, similes, or lines with a certain number of syllables to match the rhythm of the music. When you have taught some of these poetic concepts in class, ask students to download the lyrics to the top five songs at the time, identify poetic techniques in each and evaluate which is the best one poetically in terms of its use of techniques.

5. Explaining concepts:

As daggy as it sounds, songs can be a great way for students to show their understanding of concepts, and to learn new concepts. Songs for teaching grammatical concepts, for example, have been around for ages - ‘The

© Tomorrow’s Class 2014 Apostrophe Song’ is one of these (find it here on Youtube - http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc2aSz9Ficw). But songs have also been used to explain the elements of story writing and the plot for Shakespeare texts (see Flocabulary’s videos on Youtube here - http://www.youtube.com/ user/FlocabularyYT). There is even a free app called Songify that will turn spoken words into songs. Students can put their minds to coming up with their own songs to explain grammatical concepts or to summarise the plots of texts.