Music is one of the most motivating resources we can bring into our classrooms. Students love it and, as a resource, it can be exploited in many different ways. Let’s see how you can jazz up your lessons.
Pronunciation
Songs are full of rhymes, which can help students learn new vocabulary and improve their pronunciation. One good way of exploiting these rhymes is to remove all rhyming words from the song, write them on the board or on pieces of paper, and have students match the ones that rhyme. Adding extra rhyming words could make the task a bit more challenging. Do not forget to model or quickly drill new words before the activity!
Then, we could give students the song lyrics with gaps to complete with the words they worked with before. They will then listen to the song to check their choices. If students are feeling creative, they could replace some of the original words in the lyrics with words that rhyme and fit the lyrics logically.
Vocabulary
What makes songs great resources to teach vocabulary is the fact they generally provide very meaningful contexts for vocabulary learning and they tend to encourage memorization. Song lyrics contain lots of colloquialisms, idiomatic phrases and phrasal verbs, which generally revolve around a theme or topic. Simple vocabulary activities like matching new words in the lyrics with their definitions or antonyms/synonyms could be very useful to introduce or review new vocabulary.