Here are some ways to find music to use in classes:
1. Musical English Lessons International, England- good for finding songs for grammar activities
This site seems very useful to me. It is arranged by grammatical category, and within each category are a few songs. When you click on a song, you get the grammatical activity related to that song plus other things you could practice with that song (different grammatical forms, pronunciation, spelling, etc.). I highly recommend this.
2.Songfacts- ok for finding songs for vocabulary activities
This site is limited in its usefulness, but it might be worth a shot. It categorizes songs based on what words they have in their title. So you can find songs with body parts or clothing or units of measurement, even, in the title. This is not an actual language learning website, though, and of course, having "sweater" in the title does not mean that the song will have clothing as its focus or list many different articles of clothing. However, this may be a good place to start looking. Also, it does not include the lyrics of the songs on the site, but those are easy enough to find on Google usually.
3. Isabel's ESL site- suggestions for activities that can go with different songs
This site has a list of popular songs, their lyrics and activities that could be done with each song. It might be somewhat time-consuming to go through all the songs to find one that deals with prepositions in the way you want it to, for example, but if you find that your students like a particular genre of music or a certain artist, this might be good.
4. Google and YouTube - finding songs for very specific words or structures
This might seem common sense, but it wasn't always to me. I was looking for songs specifically for "wanna" and "will" and I found two ways of doing this. With Google, I would type in the target word and then "lyrics", and several songs came up. For example, when I typed in "wanna lyrics", I found a Chris Brown song, a Spice Girls songs and an All-American Rejects song, along with others. With YouTube, I would type in the target word, and several songs would pop up. When I typed in "wanna", "wanna be a billionaire" by Travie McCoy and "wanna be a baller" by Lil Troy came up.
I looked through #1-3. I think they all have potential for making interesting lessons. It's nice that some already have some pre-made activities that you can use with specific songs. I also like that you can hear the full song.
ResponderEliminarI think adults would enjoy and learn from these musical activities. High school students would also like it, but the teacher would have to make sure the songs have appropriate lyrics.
I have a student back in India who absolutely loves listening to English songs, even when he doesn't understand more than half of the English words being used in them!He randomly downloads songs and finds their lyrics on the internet and then, tries to memorize them. Once, he actually got his entire class memorize, Smack that, by Akon.
ResponderEliminarSo, I am definitely going to share these resources with him. However, my only concern with using songs in class is that sometimes the grammar is so mixed-up and inaccurate that I feel it might confuse the learners.