Audience: All Levels

Songs have long been used as an “extra” activity in ESL/EFL classrooms. They are exceptionally good at imprinting language, improving pronunciation, and motivating students. However, songs have been shown to be effective only when they are studied intensively: They have to be learned, not simply understood (Li & Brand, 2009). Here are seven steps teachers can take to get the best results, not to mention enjoyment, out of adding music to the curriculum.

1. Pick a song your students will actually like.
This is not the time to get out your Simon & Garfunkel. Get on Billboard and find something current. Choose a song with lyrics and content that everybody can relate to and feel comfortable with, including you. To illustrate this article, I chose Taylor Swift’s "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," which at this writing is #15 on the Hot 100.

2. Choose a song your students will be able to understand.
The singer should enunciate his or her words. Note the amount of slang, as well as the inscrutability of any idioms and metaphors. To get a rough idea of text difficulty level, consider pasting the lyrics into an online readability calculator or the one embedded in Microsoft Word (instructions for enabling readability statistics in MS Word 10) to get the Flesch-Kincaid score. Ms. Swift’s current hit scores a 72, which means it’s slightly easier than Reader’s Digest; Don McLean’s “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” scores a 53, on par with Time Magazine; Gilbert & Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” clocks in at 27, which is more challenging than the Harvard Law Review.

3. Use a video with synchronized captioning.
Synchronized captioning helps learners understand the lyrics, “chunk” words as collocations or phrases (Li & Brand, 2009), and memorize songs efficiently. Most popular songs already have embedded lyrics, but you can add them to any public video on YouTube (TestTube > Caption Editor > Try it out). Alternatively, you can create your own captioned video with Windows Movie Maker.

4. Slow down the playback speed of the video.
Students can pick out individual words more easily if they can slow the video down to half speed without tonal distortion. This is snap to do for any noncommercial version of the song on YouTube (TestTube > HTML 5 Video > Try it out).

5. Provide another way to hear the correct pronunciation of the lyrics.
Use Google SpeakIt! or similar free text-to-speech software. If your institution has voice pattern recognition software, by all means, use it.

6. Require your students to memorize the song.
Design activities that directly support learning the song: gap exercises, writing prompts—you know what to do. Spread the teaching process over an extended time to increase retention (Li & Brand, 2009). Treating the song like a real assignment will generate buy-in from more serious students who might otherwise consider it a frivolous activity (Li & Brand).

7. Reward students.
Once your students have memorized the song, reward them with an uncaptioned version that has a stimulating visual track. Your students will feel the prestige of being able to watch a cool, popular video unassisted, just like fluent speakers.

References

Li, X., & Brand, M. (2009). Effectiveness of music on vocabulary acquisition, language usage, and meaning for mainland Chinese ESL learners. Contributions to Music Education, 36(1), 73–84.

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Anne Alexander is a graduate student in the TESOL program at CSU Fullerton. She is conducting a 2-year self-experiment to measure how much Japanese she can learn exclusively through music.