If you read this blog regularly you will know that I have been talking about how using professionally composed and recorded backing tracks as a basis for practising any language on any topic has become a feature of the lessons I teach.
(See this post)
The attraction of this is that the music is an 'empty vessel' to which you can add any content defined by you rather than being bound by someone else's lyrics. In fact the same pieces of music can be used for many different songs.
I think all language teachers have some kind of musical affinity. The 'ear' you need to pick up an accent, to hear and feel the rhythm and pace of a language, is something very similar to having a musical ear.
Probably many of you have dabbled at writing songs for your own classes. In my own experience of doing this, writing the lyrics was not so much the problem as getting a good tune. You can adapt well known tunes of course. They are already popular and likely to be known by the pupils which leaves you free to focus on the lyrics rather than teaching the tune.
However you can also start with tunes that perhaps your pupils don't know. If it's good enough, has a strong enough rhythm, backing tracks like this can be really successful as well.
Use the power of someone else's musical talent, add it to your own linguistic skills and create a classroom hit!
In the post linked above, I related how I had run a Sing Up funded 4-week project in a primary school to examine the power of singing to aid language learning. For the yr 5 and yr 6 classes, the topics we were to cover following their scheme of work were:
yr 5 - Describing your House
yr 6 - Describing your Town
I don't know about you but these two topics generally leave me uninspired and I am always scratching around for new ideas to make them more interesting. So it was an interesting challenge to see if my enthusiasm for using singing to inspire language learning could animate these two topics.
I took 4 different tunes downloaded from the Audionetwork music production library. I was able to write the above lyrics to the backing tracks because they all had the same time signature (4/4) ie: 4 beats per bar, and they all had a verse and chorus format. The QUALITY of the tracks makes the LANGUAGE much easier to write. Begin with the music and the rest follows.
Click on the pictures below to see the lyrics generated for both topics
Voici ma maison
Dans ma ville
(For tips on writing lyrics, click on the image)
Here are the 4 backing tracks i) played without lyrics ii) with the lyrics for verse 1 and chorus of the song 'Voici ma Maison' as a sample ('scuse the singing!)
1. An Eminem style rap clip I use a lot
backing track
track with vocals
2. A Greek style clip
backing track
track with vocals
3. A Folk Pop style clip
backing track
track with vocals
4. A Rock clip
backing track
track with vocals
With ONE set of lyrics, we could sing them to 4 different tunes in 4 different styles.
Here are the same set of backing tracks behind the lyrics for 1st verse and chorus on the topic of Town
Rap
Greek
Folk pop
Rock
If you are interested in obtaining the whole songs with all of the lyrics on IWB files (Smartboard / Promethean), pdf, powerpoint, and Task Magic exercise files, I hope to be launching all of this on my other site www.souffler.co.uk soon. I will also provide links to the sources of the tunes on the Audionetwork site.
Was it successful? Here are the comments from the teacher's observing the work with these classes. Click on the image to enlarge
... and from the pupils themselves. These recordings were taken from interviews conducted with them 2 weeks after the 4 week project. The girls are very articulate but had no prior warning that they were going to be interviewed. I was amazed at their insight into what they had been doing.
Go forth and make your own amazing songs! Have fun!
