Lonnie's Vibrante Blog

How to Use Music in the Foreign Language Classroom for Maximum Effectiveness 

I have written in previous posts about the importance of using music in the classroom and which songs or chants to use for which reasons or situations. This post is about how to use music effectively and for maximum benefit for your students. Although singing in class one of the ways to use music, it is by NO means the only reason to use it. A few teachers shy away from using music either because  they don’t sing well or they say that they can’t get their students to sing. (After reading this blog post, they WILL be able to happily and successfully use music in their class)

Use Music to Introduce Genres or Specific Songs

Play the same song all week (or song of the same genre) everyday as the students walk in. They are learning incidentally at this time. On Friday talk about the genre.

Use Music to Create an Atmosphere

Play a few songs as the students (or you) get organized or as they do bell ringers. These songs can be of any type. Soft and soothing instrumentals help settle the students down and the more lively kind wake them up and get them ready to fully engage in the lesson. There have been some classes that like soothing songs so much that they unanimously begged me to play them during the final.  Of course, they ALL had to agree before I played them.

Use Music to Teach Culture

Matching lyric strips with pictures

Very often songs can help you teach many elements of culture (history, social mores, music types, dances, dialects, foods, animals, plants, and more). You may play the songs as explained above but then teach the songs further. If the song is too difficult to use as a musical listening comprehension exercise,  pass out the lyrics. They follow along as you play it again. Discuss the superficial meaning of the words, then continue to point out the cultural references or have the student research them. (“Los Desaparecidos” from the song Latinoamérica by Calle 13, a song so full of culture that it is the subject of an entire  future post)

Use Music to Teach or Reinforce Vocabulary and Expressions

I usually play a song that has vocabulary or expressions that I have been teaching. Sometimes I get lucky and have more than one word in the song. If the songs have been made up specifically for the classroom, they very often have songs that have as many as 5-8 words form a thematic unit. By using these  songs you get “more bang for your buck” or at least more reinforcement and learning per song. Some examples of good songs (chants) that have a lot of these thematic words per song are :

(Spanish) Tengo hambre
(French) J'ai faime
(Italian) Ho fame
(German) Gut und Schlecht

 Once you chose your song you have MANY choice for how to use it the best way to fit your and your students’ needs:

1.   Visual  listening comprehension.

Physical fill-in-the-blanks
 cloze activity for songs

·      Have students draw or cut out provided pictures form some words form the song. (4-8). Play the song. When the students hear the words pictured, they raise the cards. 

·      Alternately, you can give big colored cards to a  few students and have them raise them when they hear the words in the song.

·      For some songs, you can pass out big colorful cards and have the kids listen to the song, arranging themselves in the same order as the song. This activity may require that you play the song 3 times or more. That’s a good thing because the more they hear it, the deeper the song (and the reinforced words) get  into their heads. Many of the songs

·      You can get images and put them up on the interactive whiteboard and have them appear when they are sung . Thus is a very flashy exercise, but less engaging as the visual/physical ones above.

·       After completing any of the activities above, you can pass out sentence, phrases or word strips  (from the song ) for the students to pair with the pictures individually, by walking around the room to find their “partner”, or putting them on a wall or board.

Some songs that include pictures with the MP3 and exercise packet are:

(Spanish) El tiempo
(French) Le temps
(Italian) Il tempo
(German) Das Wetter

3. 2. Have the students count how many times they hear a certain word or phrase in songs that are very repetitive (Eres tú - Mocedades)
   
   
   3. Perform an action when the specified word is heard. The actions can be  standing up, clapping, or doing a physical action or gesture. (I like to use the Tex-Mex song El pantalón Blue Jeans by the Texas Tornados when I teach clothing, and I usually make the kids with jeans on stand up when they hear the words “Pantalón blue jeans”)

    4. Listening comprehension and writing

Student filling the blanks in a
musical cloze activity

• Play the song and have the students write the missing words from a cloze sheet that you make up. Sometimes, if the song is fast or the words are difficult, I’ll write the words in random order on the board.  Almost all of the song packets that I sell have these fill-in-the-blank sheets,  small pictures for many of the songs , and other activities or exercises. (I have these in Spanish, French, Italian, German, ESL, and Arabic) 
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• For a variation of the normal written cloze activity, you can have lines of the song written up in bigger writing on strips. The students can either arrange these strips on a table, the front of the room, or tape them in order on a wall.

• You may enlarge the whole song sheet, with certain words or phrases left blank. Pass out the missing words or phrases and let the students tape them on the correct blank.

5. Grammar reinforcement

• If a song uses a lot of certain grammar structures (future, preterite, future) you may want to further the usefulness of the song’s grammar by having the students make up original sentences using the same structure used in the song. An example is after hearing and writing the words to Cielito lindo  (..Canta y no llores..), the students write other pairs of words  and write affirmative followed by negative commands.

6. Extend the song by making up more verses or wring or presenting orally a narrative about the circumstances of the song. Who is singing it, why, to whom is he singing the song etc.

7. Change the tenses of the verbs used, the person  (from “I” to “he”, “she”  etc.

Some good songs for reflexive verbs and tense/persons changes are:

( Spanish) Esto es lo que hago

(French) Voici ce que je fais

(Italian) La vita mia

(German) Mein Tag

8. Have volunteers act out the song. It’s fun especially if it is romantic, which includes most of them.

9. Sing the song! Kids usually can’t wait to sing if they’ve heard it enough times and completed some activities. I have NEVER had a group of students at any age not sing songs when introduced in some of these ways. Sometimes I ask them to sing only parts of the songs, or have half of the kids sing one part, the other half sing the other half.

10. The line from Cielito Lindo  song expresses my philosophy.

“Canta y no llores, porque cantando, Cielito Lindo, se alegran los corazones.” (Sing and don’t cry, because singing, my beautiful heavenly one, make the hearts happy.)

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