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Activities and Materials for an English Course Focusing on African American Singers of Popular Music

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Activities and Materials for an English Course Focusing on African American Singers of Popular Music Activities and Materials for an English Course Focusing on African American Singers of Popular Music Peter HOWELL Institute for Foreign Language Research and Education Hiroshima University The author has spent a number of years developing a portfolio of English teaching materials using works of popular culture, notably manga (Howell, 2014) and movies and their novelizations (Howell, 2015). Songs can also have a particular emotional resonance for us as individual consumers of music, and therefore possess a powerful motivational potential for foreign language learning. However, developing a cohesive course of lessons using the lyrical medium of songs seems less straightforward than with the more overtly narrative media of film or graphic arts. It is, of course, possible to use songs in conjunction with other media such as films (Howell, 2016). But even if the film is a musical, the songs are not necessarily at the pedagogical centre of the course. This article reports on materials and activities which attempt to put songs closer to the centre of an English language course by focusing on the history of black artists in American popular music. The intention is simply to share pedagogical practice with other English teachers. No scientific claims are being made for the efficacy in terms of second language acquisition of either the materials or the activities. BACKGROUND African-American performers were among some of the most charismatic musical artists of the 20th century. They displayed a wide range of talents, from the amazing guitar picking skills of the Reverend Gary Davis, to the fabulous voice of Ella Fitzgerald, to the dancing of Michael Jackson. Moreover, the aesthetic excellence of their performances is lent an extra emotional resonance by knowledge of the social background of African Americans in 20th-century America. Although slavery had been abolished at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the black population – particularly in the Southern states – was discriminated against and repressed by laws and social structures known as the Jim Crow system. The term “Jim Crow” comes from a stereotypical minstrel character made popular in the first half of the 19th century by the blackface performer, T.D. Rice. Under the Jim Crow system, whites and blacks were supposed to be ‘separate but equal’, but the reality was that facilities and opportunities for blacks were far inferior to those for whites, and that blacks were often prevented from registering for the vote by the chicanery of arcane local regulations. It was only under the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s that civil rights for all U.S. citizens became enshrined in federal law. As stated, the term “Jim Crow” had its origins in popular 19th century musical culture in the United States, specifically in Rice’s song “Jump Jim Crow”. In blackface minstrel shows, white performers would blacken their faces and pretend to be African Americans, the stereotypical characters being the lazy and stupid plantation ‘darky’ and the more threatening, but equally ridiculous, urban ‘zip coon’. A popular musical genre particularly at the turn of the century was the ‘coon song’ featuring lyrics replete with stereotyped African American dialect and characterizations of blacks as larcenous, lazy, and lascivious. ― 101 ― Ironically, it was minstrelsy and coon songs that gave openings to some African American performers to become popular and make a living. Perhaps the most infamous coon song was “All Coons Look Alike to Me”, written by the African American singer Ernest Hogan. And the successful African American duo Bert Williams and George Walker were, on occasion, billed as “Two Real Coons” (Dormon, 1988, p.454). As Karl Hagstrom Miller (2010, p.139) explains, “some [black composers] believed that the benefits they received – in terms of bookings, reviews, money, and a platform from which to subtly challenge white expectations – were worth it at least for a time”. Thus it would be a mistake to think that African Americans were limited to performing ‘African American music’ only. Miller’s book is a salutary reminder that some African American ‘folk’ artists were also adept at playing a variety of popular commercialized music, a fact neglected by later well-meaning purists who sought to essentialize and compartmentalize ‘black music’. Nevertheless, the story of African American performers in the 20th century is basically an uplifting story of political progress, as the success of the artists ran in tandem with the removal of the Jim Crow laws and the passing of civil rights legislation. It is the story of Jewish businessman Norman Granz’s efforts to desegregate jazz audiences, the story of the rediscovery of old bluesmen by eager young white aficionados in the 1960s, the story of James Brown taking control of his own business affairs, and of Berry Gordy pioneering the successful crossover of black Motown artists and creating ‘the sound of young America’ (White, 2016). As a teacher, the author’s rationale for choosing these materials was to make a connection between Teaching English as a Foreign Language and issues of inequality and social justice in the English-speaking world. LESSON ACTIVITIES The course was an optional English culture and language course offered at the Faculty of Education of Hiroshima University. The goal was not to provide ‘effective’ English instruction as in a functional- communicative paradigm of English Education, but rather to combine a traditional cultural approach with humanistic pedagogical principles. As previously mentioned, the author’s purpose in listing and exemplifying the activities is to share practice. The description is, therefore, anecdotal. The course consisted of 14 90-minute English lessons: 11 core lessons and three review lessons. The students were 57 second-year undergraduates, mostly majoring in either English Education or Elementary School Education. The materials for each core lesson were comprised of DVD recordings of performances by one or by two featured artists or groups, a short passage from an English book dealing with one of the artists accompanied by its Japanese translation, a list of conversational questions and possible answers, and a CD-recording of a song recorded by one of the artists to be featured in the following class. Each core lesson had the same pattern of activities, as listed below. 1. Head (a) song 1: peer correction (b) watching video 1 (c) peer messaging 2. Block 1: Short Book Passage (a) bilingual vocabulary matching (b) filling in blanks (c) pair dictation ― 102 ― (d) listening and sequencing 3. Block 2: Song 2 (a) sentence reconstruction (b) watching video 2 (c) sentence chanting 4. Block 3: Rotating Pair Conversations 5. Tail CD listening exercise As in the template described in Howell (2016), each core lesson ended with a word-completion listening activity, which was then checked at the beginning of the following lesson. In the tail activity an A4 sheet with the lyrics to a song was given to each student. A limited number of words had letters deleted, which were to be filled in while listening to the song on an audio CD, following which, the sheets were collected by the teacher. Then, in the head activity of the next class, the teacher wrote the correct spellings on the board and distributed the completed sheets randomly to the class. While watching a performance of the same song on video, the students corrected their classmates’ spellings and also wrote a message on an attached post-it note. Below is an example of a tail activity using the lyrics of Eroll Garner and Johnny Burke’s jazz standard, “Misty”. The numbers in brackets represent the number of missing letters. Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tr……………. (2); And I feel li………………….. (2) I’m clinging to a cloud, I can’t understand I get misty, just holding your h……………. (3). Walk my way, And a thousand violins begin to p………………….. (3), Or it may be the sound of your hello, That music I hear, I get misty whenever you’re ne………………. (2). You can see that you’re leading me on And it’s just what I w……………………… (3) you to do, Don’t you notice how ho………………………………. (8) I’m lost? That’s why I’m following you. On my own, When I wander through this wonderland al…………………… (3), Never knowing my right foot from my le…………….. (2) My hat from my glo……………………. (2) I’m too misty, and too much in love. Too misty, And too much in love. The second block in each core lesson was centred on a short reading passage from a published book, ― 103 ― giving some information about one of the performers featured in the lesson. However, participants were required to construct the text themselves rather than simply being presented with it and asked to read. First, in order to facilitate comprehension, they skim-read a Japanese translation of the English passage. Following this, ten English vocabulary items were highlighted. The term ‘highlighted’ is used in preference to ‘taught’ because the purpose was to facilitate text construction and comprehension rather than to commit to memory these particular items. No claim is being made that such items meet any kind of needs analysis following a typical applied linguistic paradigm of English Teaching. Highlighting was realized by distributing to 10 students slips of yellow paper with an English expression on each slip, and distributing to another 10 students slips of green paper with its equivalent from the published Japanese translation, asking the 20 students to find their translation match, and write both English and Japanese on the board. Class members then drilled the expressions, following the teacher who used the technique of repeating and expanding. After vocabulary highlighting, participants did a blank-fill activity and then a pair-dictation to write out the short reading passage.
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