The sounds of music

The objective

To listen to and understand a song

The language

Grammar-wise: it depends...

Connected speech: assimilation, elision, liaison

Contractions

Chunking

The set-up

Remember, TBL means using content which interests the learners--that means that the first step requires you to find a song that will interest them not you. Check out the top 10 on iTunes and download a song for 99 cents. Choose a song that YOU of course can understand and that´s fairly short. Pop songs work the best, generally. Next, transcribe the lyrics. Copy them onto a second sheet and take away the content words (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) from the verses. For high-level learners, take out more; for lower-levels, take out less (one per line?). DO NOT take out words in the chorus. Print out copies for everyone in the class.

The low-down

Tell students they´re going to listen to a song and write-down the lyrics. Play the first 10 seconds of the song and ask if they recognize it. Tell the class if no one guesses. Explain that you´re going to play the song all the way through and you would just like them to listen and decide what the song is about (you can write this question on the board). Play it through once and ask students to discuss their ideas in pairs or groups. Check with the class after a few minutes and discuss. To see if they´re right, play only the chorus as this is usually where the main idea of a song is. Were they right? Make sure they understand, more or less, what the song is about. Next, tell them you´re going to play only the chorus and you´d like them to write down, word for word what they hear. Play the chorus and pause after each line of the lyric. Play through the chorus several times, if necessary. Ask students to check with a partner. Once they´ve got it. Hand out the open-cloze lyrics you printed out and ask them if they can guess any of the missing words (in pairs). Don´t check. After a minute or so, play through the song (pausing often, and repeating chunks when necessary) so they can fill in the missing words to the lyrics. Play the song again, pausing after each line and asking students to check their answers with a partner. Finally, play the song through without stopping and ask them to read along as they listen (and enjoy!).

Now what?

Now you can do several things. You can either ask discussion questions about the song and get them discussing the content of the song. You can use the lyrics to focus on one of the above language points: pronunciation (reading aloud), connected speech (marking where words are connected and checking against the recording), chunking (marking where slight pauses should/could be), etc. Or, you can focus on a grammar point you think is worthy of attention.

More talk-time

Do you like this artist?

What kind of music are you listening to at the moment?

Where do you listen to music usually?

Do you try to understand the lyrics to an English-language song?

What´s most difficult about understanding the lyrics to a song?