Music is universal in the sense that every culture has it. It is used for various social functions and plays a part in most people’s everyday lives. Music and songs are prevalent at sports events, weddings, funerals, parties, and religious and public ceremonies. They can be heard in shopping malls and elevators, on public and private transportation, and at the dentist, doctor, and salon. These are but a handful of the social situations and places where music is widely encountered. Humans use music and songs for expressing emotion, inducing pleasure, and as a vehicle for communication. As a medium for communication, music has been instrumental in helping people build bridges and make connections within the global community. Through communities big and small, popular English language songs have crossed countless borders and are now ever-present in the conversations and daily lives of English language learners around the world. With the rapid advancement of computers, the Internet, and mobile devices, it has never been easier for students and teachers to exploit the interconnectedness of music and language both inside and outside the language learning classroom.

The idea of using music to facilitate language learning is not new. Language teaching professionals have recognized and endorsed the value of music and songs as a factor in the language learning process for a number of years. For example, Lems (2005) has observed various benefits that have come from regularly using music and songs in the classroom, such as creating a relaxed and nonthreatening learning environment for students; fostering positive attitudes and affect; broadening learners’ cultural awareness; improving their listening comprehension; providing opportunities for practice with prosodic features of language, such as stress, rhythm, and intonation; and building their vocabulary. Furthermore, the lyrics learners are exposed to in popular songs are said to contain a large percentage of high frequency vocabulary that is authentic, colloquial, and highly repetitive (Murphey, 1992).

In vocabulary learning, the high frequency words (the first 3,000 word families for English) are of utmost importance, because they are the words learners will most often encounter and subsequently use. Browne (2012) contends that many L2 learners have "huge gaps in knowledge of core words at even the 1,000–2,000 word level" (p. 19). Waring and Nation (1997) assert, "There is little sense in focusing on other vocabulary until these are well learned" (p. 9). Anything teachers and learners can do to ensure the learning of these high frequency words is worth doing, and popular English language songs could be a useful resource to achieve such an objective.

This presentation will report on a vocabulary study utilizing lexical profiling to investigate the vocabulary demands of a large corpus of the most popular American and British songs. With the advent of computerized corpus analysis in the 1950s and 1960s, the task of compiling and analyzing corpus data became far easier and more common. With these advances in technology came the emergence of lexical profiling. The idea behind lexical profiling research is the principle that the more frequent a word is the more important it is to learn (Nation, 2013). In this study, lexical profiling was used to examine the text coverage, which is the percentage of a text that is accounted for by a certain number of high, mid, and low frequency words, of popular American and British songs. Findings from text coverage analyses provide educators with an extremely useful set of resources that they can apply to curriculum and course design, the setting of vocabulary and language learning goals, and materials and test development.

The songs included in the corpus in this study were selected according to their impact and influence on culture, the assumption being that music and songs capture the spirit of the time they represent and, within that zeitgeist, the language of those times. Thus, because of the large impact and strong influence these songs had and still have on culture today, they are the songs most accessible to and representative of the population and the language of that population. Moreover, in the case of English language learners, these popular English language songs are the ones they will most likely be exposed to and familiar with. For this study, a song’s impact on culture was determined by its ranking by experts in the music industries in the United States and the United Kingdom, and by its popularity based on record sales and radio play in the United States and record sales in the United Kingdom. Songs based on music industry expert opinion were taken from the best of song lists published by two established music magazines. Songs selected according to popularity were obtained from music charts in the United States and the United Kingdom over the last 60 years.

Preliminary results from the analysis of the lyrics in the corpus support Murphey’s (1992) findings and suggest that popular American and British songs may be an appropriate source of input for high frequency vocabulary for language learners. In this session, the presenter will provide the lexical profiles of the American and British songs from the corpus and discuss the implications for teaching and learning opportunities with popular English language songs. Participants will also be introduced to resources they can use to do their own lexical profiling.

REFERENCES

Browne, C. (2012). Maximizing vocabulary development with online resources. The Language Teacher, 36(4), 18–20.

Lems, K. (2005). Music works: Music for adult English language learners. New Directions for Adult & Continuing Education, 107, 13–21.

Murphey, T. (1992). The discourse of pop songs. TESOL Quarterly, 26, 770–774.

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning vocabulary in another language (2nd ed.). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Waring, R., & Nation, I. S. P. (1997). Vocabulary size, text coverage, and word lists. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: Description, acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 6–19). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Rick Romanko is an associate professor at Wayo Women’s University in Japan. He holds an MEd in TESOL from Temple University. He has published papers on extensive reading, task-based language learning, and developing effective questionnaires. His current research interests include corpora-informed vocabulary and language learning, connected speech, and exploring how learning is enhanced through various teaching approaches.