Using Songs in the TEFL Classroom

What we are talking about in this blog, are classic pop and rock songs for use with teenagers and adults. We have the advantage these days of working with music-literate groups of students who are used to accessing and listening to music from a variety of genres and periods. In my experience these days, young people are far more eclectic in their tastes, so this opens up a wide range of possibilities.

Of course, with younger students, you can use traditional children’s songs or nursery rhymes, or songs that have been written by practitioners to focus on specific vocabulary or structures. However, these latter vary widely in quality and, by their nature, usually feel quite contrived. They are unlikely to get the same kind of response as songs that have been written for a mass listenership. Having said this, I can understand the temptation to come up with your own song rather than spending hours trawling YouTube or Spotify for a song with enough examples of the third conditional!

However, sourcing songs to use can be fun too, particularly if you build up your playlist over an extended period and let it develop organically. If you do this, you will eventually have a ready-made playlist from which to choose something that is age, level and task/activity appropriate. 

There are quite a few lists of these online, but a lot of lists include entries that have relatively few examples of the target structure. If you have time, you can get around this problem by editing together a compilation of short clips from different songs. This is easy to do these days – there are a lot of free music editing apps, but it does take a little time and effort. The good news is that for several structures at least, there are songs out there that include multiple instances of the target language form. We’ve curated a list of our favourites, just to get you started:

If you are planning to use songs for general listening practice, or as an introduction to a theme or topic, there are a couple of decisions you need to make:

• Do I need to produce an accompanying handout?

• Do I use just an audio or a video version of the song?

If you are working with a group of more advanced students, having them listen to the audio only may help them focus on the language. We suggest playing through once and having them listen extensively, then playing a second time and letting them take notes, listen for specific information or answer some comprehension questions. However, videos are great with lower-level students, and there are a lot out there with lyrics overlaid if you want to make it a combined listening and reading activity.

These days, producing handouts is a quick and easy business. You can source copies of most lyrics online. However, watch out for sites that use machine-generated transcripts, that can be littered with errors and inaccuracies. Once you’ve found a decent copy, just cut and paste it into a document, and reformat to adjust the font, line spacing and text size. Make sure you credit the writer on your handout. If you are a teacher, producing handouts for your class for non-commercial, educational purposes is generally considered Fair Use, so you are unlikely to have any issues with copyright. However, it is a common courtesy to credit the writer – and your students will probably want to know anyway.

Once you have your handout, you have several options for activities, including:

• If it is a structure-focused activity, have students circle or underline any instances of the target structure. Elicit or present the form and discuss the various functions. Move on to grammar practice activities focused on the production of the form.
• If it’s an activity focused on listening for keywords and phrases, save a copy of the document and create a gap-fill by deleting selected words and replacing them with lines or boxes for students to complete whilst listening. Because this is simple to do, you can easily create differentiated versions, with easier or more difficult words to identify, and with fewer or more gaps. If you have a mixed-ability class, you can produce two or three different versions, and assign these accordingly, or let students decide for themselves which version to work with.
• If it’s going to be used as the basis for a discussion, you might want to do the listening first, ask some questions about it, and then hand out the transcription for reference and/or further discussion.
• You could produce and copy some sets of cards with words from the song and during or after listening, have groups order the words according to where they come in the song. Replay for the groups to check and correct.

There are lots of songs out there with stories and they are a fantastic resource because they tend to engage the students and are great for issue-based discussions, for ordering of events, or for discussing emotions, personal experiences or important life events. There is so much out there that you should be able to find something that is thematically relevant and in a genre that will appeal to you and your students. Again, just to start you off, here are a few examples that demonstrate the diversity of musical styles and themes you can tap into. They range from the humorous to the tragic. Remember, always be careful when dealing with upsetting or challenging subject matter, or songs containing language that could cause offence.

• Hurricane by Bob Dylan (racial injustice)

• Nothing Compares to You by Prince (Loss)

• Save the Last Dance for Me by The Drifters (a disabled man watches his wife dance with other men)

• Fast Car by Tracy Chapman (poverty and young love)

• Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles (loneliness)

• Someone Like You by Adele (relationship break-up)

• Jolene by Dolly Parton (love and jealousy)

• *Sheila by Jamie T (drink, drugs, domestic violence and suicide)

• The Most Beautiful Girl (in the room) by Flight of the Conchords (spoof about a loser who meets a girl at a party)

• Mean by Taylor Swift (bullying)

• Stan by Eminem (obsession)

• Common People by Pulp (Class difference)

*Explicit lyrics, adult themes, and quite tricky colloquial language.

If you don’t know it, here is a bit of fun for all you grammar nerds out there - Word Crimes by Weird Al Yankovic: a grammar nerd parody of Blurred Line.