Hi cgarrido,

This is an interesting topic. As far as songs are concerned, there are many ways for them to be used in class. For instance, I use them for pronunciation practice, lexis acquisition and listening practice. For the first, I generally select some words and replace them for the phonemic script in which students are supposed to listen and recognise the word. In addition, I like putting pairs of words for learners recognise the difference between weak forms such as sit/seat or live/leave. For lexis I select some expressions and ask students to try to guess by context, I sometimes bring dictionaries to the class in case they don't get it by context. For listening practice, there's a good activity my students really fancy doing which is giving them some parts of the song(a sentence or word) and when they listen to that they are supposed to do something like clapping hands or jumping. It's great fun!

Needless to say, the use of songs in classroom is a really effective tool in TEFL. Students get involved and motivated all the time.

Best wishes,

Rômulo 

Hello Rómulo, thanks for your ideas; we have been discussiong about how to teach pronunciation and your ideas seem simple to put into practice and very interesting.

carmen gloria

Hello Carmen Gloria and Romulo,

I try to use songs, in my teaching, as much as I can. I have been an English teacher for about 20 years now. At the moment I am teaching in a primary school in China. I have worked with students from other countries as well, but noone takes to singing in class like the Chinese students do. I have used songs for teaching and reinforcing grammar, sentence patterns, vocabulary, pronunciation and just plain fun.

Here in China I started teaching kindergarten for the first time in my life and realised how much fun it can be. The kindergarten administration wants me to use a book which is not very good. It has been created by a Chinese team and most of the song in the book are badly writen texts to familiar kiddies' tunes. The flow of the phrase has nothing to do with the English language rhythm or intonation. This provoked me to start writing my own texts to these tunes. I try to implement the vocabulary from the unit we have been studying into the song. For example, when we were studying food, I managed to come up with: (use the Alphabet song tune))::)):

Rice and noodles,

Chicken and fish.

I'm so hungry give me a dish!

Ice ream , cookies, apples and milk (2)

Rice and noodles,

chicken and fish.

I'm so hungry give me a dish!

This text literally covers all the new vocabulary including the phrase "I am hungry!"

The children are 4 years old. First, we play around with some flashcards. Then we have a race between two teams with lots of hand slapping and saying of the new words and finally we sing.

And here I will say it again, it doesn't matter how old you are here in China. Everybody loooooves singing!!!

best, Iskra (moderator for young learners)

Hello, Iskra I wish I were as creative as you are.

Carmen Gloria

Hello colleagues,

You are so creative using songs as a teaching tool! It's a good idea of Iskra to implement the vocabulary from the unit into the songs.

The  course bookI use in Russia (grade 5 and 6) contains a lot of songs. And the children enjoy singing very much. Songs and poems are a good way to memorize the words and grammar. Besides our school is a school with musical education - students are taught singing and playing musical instruments. That is why I often work in a pair with the teacher of music and we make a good students's singing together. We sometimes organize concerts for parents with reciting poems and singing songs in English.

Before learning a song I give the students words and ask them to connect the rhymed words. Then I cut each part of the song into lines and ask students to put the lines into logical order. Sometimes we have different variants and it is fun. The children can work in groups of 4 or in pairs.

Regards,

Larissa

Hello everybody

 I feel very identified with the job You do with songs because I do the same. Many teachers don't know how helpful  songs are. I use songs very often to teach English. I use songs in English courses (General purposes. academic purposes, professional purposes and specific purposes), primary, sencodary, and university levels. I do the same as Romulo and Larissa do. Since my passion is music, I've used songs for a long time and they have been a good material for teaching English at any level.

We can teach not only, as Romulo and Iskra pointed, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structures, pronunciation, but also very specific things such as supragementals (gemination, elision, assimilation and linking sounds), tones and word accents. It is amazing the may things we can do with songs, it's just matter of creativityn and imagination.

   Regards

              Vladimir Alvarez

Hello Vlaldimir, I have a question , how do you choose the songs? according to what students like? their age?

best wishes

Hi Cgarrido.

Well, choosing the song is a matter of time. Of course I am not saying it is easy, but it si not hard neither. I choose the song according to the contents I'm going to teach. For example, I'd use the song MORE THEN WORDS from the group EXTREME to teach modal verbs or BLOWING IN THE WIND from BOB DYLAN, just as an example. There have to be one condition, the teacher should have a very good knowledge and backgrounds about musical groups and singers. Teachers can even use songs to discuss and present social contents, for example, The Christina aguilera song YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL to discuss about the how people feel inside and how they see themselves as an individual.

The kind of students I use songs with are those from the English courses I teach, teens and adults. I also use songs in teacher training courses, in courses of English fos specific purposes and also at university level.

The ages vary between courses and levels, but generally they are between 18 to 50 years old and in some cases more than 50. So the thing is that the teacher who uses songs has to have imagination and creativity when using them.

Vladimir Alvarez