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Songs are a useful way to teach English and reading comprehension. I have used songs in the past to encourage students to learn the words of songs. And to this day those students still listen to Music; they still try to learn the words of songs. Teaching English through songs is a great way to acclimate students to American culture as well. Further it encourages students’ curiosity and their love of reading. It is very easy to hook students into learning English through music. However you have to ensure you pick good music for our lesson plans. So we’ll use ‘Let it Be’ in our lesson. Of course we are teaching to older students, mixed ages, ages 21-50. The lesson plan is by the end of the day to get all students to be able to sing along to Let it be; they will be tested by having each group of 2 get up in front of the class and sing the song karaoke style. Of course if students are deathly afraid of doing Karaoke, that’s ok too. They don’t have to present, though they may get encouraged if they are singing along with another person in front of the class. I think this activity will build cohesion amongst the students because as a class, we are all working to get all the lyrics and have perfect pronunciation. In many of today’s songs, you’ll find way too much slang words, so this is why I prefer the Beatles; perfect English! For more advanced students, they could sing other songs by other artists in front of the class, so this activity may encourage participation and curiosity in that students can go seek other songs in the vast amount of songs out there. The only challenge would be to sing the right songs for our group. For elementary kids, you may sing Old McDonald had a farm, or Mary had a little Lamb or the wheels of the Bus, but for older adults you go with the Beatles, just because they don't have any questionable content and their music is just plain great! When picking songs, I would stick to the one rule in terms of movies. The same way you rate movies, you have to rate songs, so you choose songs that are PG-13 rating! To start off the lesson, a good way to engage them would be to ask the class do you know who the Beatles are? Who are the 4 members of the group? You have to have some questions picked out and put the answers to these on the board. As a class we’ll pick 5 songs to sing. Today we sing Let it Be, but tomorrow they may sing any other Beatles song they way. As a group, pair all students up into twos, have the students find the lyrics to these songs and print them out, learn the song and ensure that students have each learned all the words to these songs. Have students pair up and sing the words to each other. After some time, have each group stand in front of class and sing the song Karaoke style. It important for students to lose the fear of public speaking, so I would incorporate Karaoke into my lesson. I feel the kids who are able to present are better equipped in our culture, and feel that karaoke can teach them valuable presentation skills. One day would not be the end all for this lesson. The next day the students could pick their own Beatles song and sing it in front of the class Karaoke style, for extra credit or just for fun. Songs are a very useful way to teach English, but we must ensure we pick songs that have no questionable language. But it does bring up a good point; how do we teach slang and swear words that are now common place in our vocabulary? Or do we ignore these altogether? But of course for the lesson to go right, we must ensure we have the proper technology in place and things should go smoothly. We must ensure we have a printer if we are going to print out the lyrics, we must ensure we have a way to read the lyrics on the screen like using Youtube, but we can do the best we can by adapting to what we have. With popular music, opportunities are endless, there are so many songs that we could devote a whole class to learn all the words to each song, we could also see how the Beatles used for example the present tenses like "Mother Mary is standing right in front of me" so students learn how to pronounce different words, how they are all used and ideas like tenses can be explained more easily.
