Souffler - a breath of fresh air

Defrag your linguistic memory with music, rhythm and song

I find talks from the TED site fascinating. I picked up the this video via Laura Doggett's blog, http://lauradoggett.com/, a really useful site for anyone interested in all things techie and MFL. Anyone who gets companies to give them expensive kit to review has my respect!

So this video is from Patricia Kuhl and is entitled "The Linguistic Genius of Babies".

What strikes me here is that there is an emotional context to language learning that helps the baby filter out extraneous sound and home in on the sound patterns that bring a reward in terms of making human connections.

In my work with music and language learning, my theory is that music and song are excellent vehicles for connecting emotion to language acquisition, and it was interesting to see the role of human and emotional connection highlighted here.

What is also fascinating to see is that as we get older we 'retreat' and become 'enclosed' within our own cultural and linguistic systems. It becomes increasingly harder to break out of them simply because I think we have a memory bank that is filling up, even clogging up with stored responses to inputs. It's a hard-drive in need of a de-frag to free up space.

I suppose I see music, song and rhythm as kind of de-frag software for language learning. They 'slide' new language into children's brains, flying under the radar of their stored responses. They help penetrate into parts of their consciousness where  new information can be retained without having to pass through all of the border controls of stored cultural and linguistic filtering.

So, the younger the child, the more uncluttered the memory bank, the more receptive to new input. The older we get, the slower we are to assimilate new sounds and structures that do not match those already in our memory bank.

In the push to promote Primary Languages in the UK, one of the strains on the initiative is that though children can very easily pick up new language, the teachers who have to be re-trained to teach them find it much harder to re-learn.

The real difficulty lies less in acquiring the lexical and grammatical syntax of the language but in being able to 'tune' into the different sounds and mimic them. Prounuciation is a key issue. Fear of sounding inauthentic is a serious inhibtor in Primary MFL teachers.

Here again I believe, but can't prove, that on teacher language re-training programmes, re-learning a language with a significant input from music, rhythm and song might help. Someone somewhere ought to research an initiative to examine whether this is true. Could a program be devised where this is an integral rather than a peripheral part of it?

 

Newquay Primary Languages Conference

 

It was a privilege to work with colleagues at this event. Here are the session notes and some resource packs for 

i) Running a French Singing Assembly

The package is presented in French but can be adapted to other languages pretty easily.

I do this in schools to introduce language learning to children and staff.

All the resources are in 3 formats: powerpoint : Smartboard Notebook : Promethean Flipchart

Download the pack in 2 parts by visiting these links. If you have any problems downloading these contact me using the email address I gave you at the conference and put 'Newquay Primary Languages' in your email header.

FRENCH SINGING ASSEMBLY 

Contents 

FRENCH SINGING ASSEMBLY_EXTRAS

Contents

Example Contents of a folder

ii) Workshop - "Putting the "Mmmm-Factor" into your lessons : Music Makes Meaning Memorable"

Due to copyright restrictions I cannot post either the slideshow or many of the materials I used in this. The notes however give you all the links you need to get started.

Some of the materials are going to be available on my other site hopefully in early May. If you want to be put on the email list to find out when they go live please fill in the contact form on www.souffler.co.uk

Please download the notes from the workshop here. Click on the picture below to see a sample of the first page.

Download MUSIC MAKES MEANING MEMORABLE.doc (107.5K)

Included in this document is a list of quick links of all of the blog posts on this topic from this site.

You can also download this list here.

Download SOUFFLER SONG BLOG POSTS.rtf (6.7K)

Finally, if you have benefited from this training and think you know anyone who might be interested in booking me to come and further work with them, I'm always open to offers! Please send them the link to this blog post

http://souffler.typepad.com/home/2011/03/newquay-primary-languages-conference.html

and ask them to complete this form giving as much information as I might need to follow this up.

Finally if you have anything to tell me about using these ideas, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below!

Enjoy the resources!

 

Using foreign language songs to teach pronunciation (4)

Hmm! This seems to becoming rather a theme on this site!

As so much traffic is visiting these posts I thought I would flag up a very old post from this site which I put up to help teach French colours in primary schools.

I was using the French Noddy song "Oui, oui" which all primary classes sing with predictable sniggering and general merriment. Here it is:

As a song to teach pronunciation of the 'i' (eee) phoneme it is really useful as most of the lyric rhymes are based on this.

You can also point out the 'w' sound in front of it when adding 'u' (oui) and the following 'y' sound in 'aill' (vaillant).

Here is the link to the old post on this where you can find the lyrics, mp3 versions of the tune and other materials to teach colours.

How to write your own songs for language teaching

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!

 

 

Using foreign language songs to teach pronunciation (3)

Here is another well know Disney Song from the film Aladdin. You could use this to highlight the 'eu' phoneme.

The French and English lyrics are here.

Download Whole new world

Comparing the two helps point out how impossible it is to translate exactly when trying to make a rhyme. The French version's end of line rhymes determine the message which is slightly different.

 

 

Using foreign language songs to teach pronunciation (2)

Another example of an FL song that you can use to focus on one particular area of pronunciation, this example in French, thanks to Louis Bassoon who posted this comment on my previous post on this topic .....

I love using songs in my lessons, and looking at pronunciation in a song has proved to be a really good way of tackling certain aspects of the language. Have a look at Natasha St Pierre's song "Tu trouveras" on YouTube. I found a version with the words, got the pupils to listen and watch and write down how many times there was a word ending in s where the s was silent (and then, on the second listening, they spotted how many final s were actually pronounced). The pupils were focused, fascinated and asking to sing along after about 3 listenings. They also now have a clear impression of how a final s in French is rarely pronounced - they are now compiling a list of examples every time they spot one.

... so here is the link to Natasha St Pierre singing 'Tu Trouveras' with the lyrics hosted at Youtube.

 I think this post from Louis underlines what I was saying that you don't have to dive headlong into comprehension of the text before being able to use songs for a real linguistic purpose in your lessons.

A song to showcase the French Imperfect Tense

Update

I will be adding a file in a few days that enable you to generate various exercises and worksheets based on this song. Bear with me and come back at the end of the week!

This is a beautiful song from Toy Story 2 about love, love lost and love regained.

And here are the parallel lyrics in French and English.

 Download Quand elle m'aimait encore

  French version mp3

  English version as composed by Randy Newman and sung by Sarah MchLachlan

I would be fascinated to hear how you would exploit this song and at what level of age ability. Leave some ideas that others can benefit from!

For example at what level of ability would pupils be able to make a comparison of the French and English texts to work out if it is an exact translation or liberal interpretation? Is the title translated differently? What could pupils produce creatively using this song as an inspiration? Their own poems? A short film? A letter written between the people involved? A wordcloud of all the words this song evokes?

 

 

 

 

 

Using foreign language songs to teach pronunciation

I have said in previous posts that my ideas on why, when and how to use songs to support language learning have undergone a fairly major shift. Before, finding the correct lyrics was the prime factor in deciding what I might use. In this post I am going to suggest that before even understanding a song, you can use it to teach children to understand the relation between new phonic and graphic patterns.

This song, "You've got a friend in me" from Toy Story has the advantage that it is really well known and liked in English so the key notion of "Friendship" at the heart of it is usually understood.

In French it is called "Je suis ton ami" and offers a chance to show pupils two common phonic patterns that occur in French and which can cause problems when learning how to read and pronounce them. These are the 'w' sound that occurs between a consonant and the vowels 'oi' and 'ui' eg: 'moi' / 'puis' and the 'y' sound that occurs in words such as those containing '-ieu' '-ill' eg: vieux / vieille

Here is an extract from the French lyrics with words containing these phonemes highlighted. The whole Word document can be downloaded here.

Download Toy Story - Je suis ton ami.mp3 (1991.9K)

You could either present the song with the highlights already put in or ask pupils to try and pick out and highlight these patterns for themselves as they listen.

If you have any ideas as to which songs might be useful for teaching certain phonemes in certain languages, leave a comment and/or a link below!

Lesson starters - some thoughts

I want to share a few ideas about this that have helped me recently. This work is primarily with KS1/2/3 pupils but to be honest, depending upon your relationship with the class and how they relate to each other you could use it any level.

One of the concepts I have picked up from my recent singing training is how important it is to go through a warm-up routine for your voice. You can't jump straight into singing without awakening all of the vocal and body muscles that help you to be successful. Why should speaking in a different language be any different?

I know that we have been drilled to begin our lessons with a starter and end with a plenary, all good practice.

I would like to offer some starter suggestions that are a bit different.

The main aims I now have when considering what kind of starter to use are:

1) What time of day is it? Do I need to 'warm the class up', start of the day, or 'calm them down', immediately after lunch or break?

2) Is it a group activity that will help focus the whole class, get them listening to me, bring them together as a group positively engaged in the lesson? This rules out traditional Q and A sessions that involve individuals answering questions that 29 other pupils have to listen to.

3) Does it lift the spirits of everyone (including me!)? Does it make everyone glad to be in that moment, sharing it and beginning to feel good about themselves? Children arrive in our lessons with 30 different thought patterns bouncing around in their minds. Because they are like the rest of the human race, and we all find it much easier to latch onto negative thoughts than positive ones, and arrive in your lesson worrying about home, friendship fallouts, boy-girlfriend issues, feelings of inadequacy, failure, poor body image, bullying etc etc. Any teacher needs to have some activities which can 'switch' the mood and generate some positive thinking.

4) Speaking, like singing is a 'whole body' experience. Starters need to be both physical and mental warm-ups.

Before you begin, explain that you are looking for a WHOLE class response. They need to all respond, as one voice, all in time together. Repeat until you get this right, Insist upon it. Do in two teams if necessary and judge who does it best.

Here are a few ideas. First, the 'wake up' type of starters

• simple breathe and stretch exercises, moving/touching parts of the body, using the target language which they have to repeat as they do the actions. Add a musical backing track that will pick a mood up. (See a previous post on this here)
• Vary the above exercise from slow to faster, vary your pitch of voice. One thing I do that children seem to enjoy is to move your voice up and down a pitch as you i) lift yourself up/let yourself down by your hair and say in a rising/falling voice 'cheveux' ii) do the same with your ears iii) press your belly button and voice goes up in pitch as you say 'nombril' iv) do the same with arms/hands/legs being raised/lowered. As you will all look look and sound ridiculous doing this, including the teacher, it gives tacit permission to all to not worry about looking and sounding ridiculous when speaking the language, a crucial factor as your lesson develops.
• Introducing and practising group praise phrases. This has proved to be one of the most fun and positively reinforcing activities I have done. You teach your class 4 simple praise phrases in the language you are teaching in. In French I use 'Super, Excellent, Fantastique, Génial'. Pupils repeat the phrases after me in whatever voice I choose but we also do an action (thumbs up for super, skiing hands for excellent, index finger pointed up in the air first right then left then right hand, 3 punches out in front for each syllable of gé-ni-al. You need to match actions to syllables. This is a vital part of early language learning as it helps children with any phonic approach to language learning, to separate sound forms within whole words. The last part is the most powerful part as we take different pupils' names to attach to the praise phrase and add a 3 part silly action that everyone copies to  their name. So it might be 'Fan-tas-tique, Co-o-nnor' 'Ex-ce-llent Ma-ri-anne' with a 3 part action to their name, disco sky pointing, hip wiggles, Egyptian shimmy, make up as many stupid 3 part actions you like! The beauty of this is that once the pupils get hold of it you can ask them to come to the front and lead the whole class in praising a pupil. This is quite often hilariously funny as they are all far more imaginative then me in the actions they choose.
• You could substitute praise phrases for any language you want to recap on at the start of the lesson. Put on a backing track with a great rhythm and you can put silly actions to absolutely any language or topic you like. Again get pupils to suggest the moves and the language to revise, hence revising it! Put some picture prompts or key language prompts on the board if necessary.
• Having done this next one once with pupils, I get requests to do it again regularly at the start of a lesson. It's the French / German / Spanish/ Urdu etc etc Haka. You simply take the vowel sounds of a language, get the class into warrior mode, knees bent, hands on knees, all facing me and looking fierce (model your own fiercest look!!), than repeat the actions and vowel sounds after me. I do 'A' + both hands pushed out in front, 'E' both hands back pointing to me, 'I' one hand streching up, the other down in front of me to draw an I shape, 'O' draw a circle 'o' shape with both hands either side of you, 'U' do a u-shape with both hands' fingers either side of you. You can do this loud, you can do this softly. I ask pupils to suggest a consonant to put in front of the vowels. If they suggest 'j' it's an ideal way to show that 'j' makes a vowel soft in French so we do the 'friendly Haka' in a soft voice! Adding other consonants means that you can repeat this activity.

Second, the 'calm down' type of starters

Simply put, you can do any of the above but change:

• to sitting instead of standing
• the type of music or slow down an upbeat track using sound editing software (Audacity / Wavepad)
• the speed of the exercises
• from louder voice to softer voice
• from whole group responses to two team responses where you award points for the best pronunciation, the team that best responds as a whole unit, as ONE voice

• A bit more of a challenge would be to build up a bank of singing stories. I have started to do this. To calm a group down, you could move a simple story to the beginning of your lesson. I then get them to sit and listen to the story, but get them to repeat key sections with a silly action. I also set bits of the story that are often repeated to music and create mini-songs within the story. Take a track from your stock of backing tracks I have been encouraging you to build up. You can then move from the story onto exploiting some of the language introduced in the rest of the lesson.

• You can add in a simple breathing trick to get quiet. Invite the class to take a breath, and hold it with you until you say a word/phrase you want to revise, which they then repeat letting out their breath as they do so. Usually the noisiest kids are also the most competitive about wanting to show how long they can hold their breath for! (Tip: get them all to take a gentle deep breath in)

Hope this is all of some use.

Post a comment to share some of your own lesson starter tips!

Have fun!

New song packages

I have been working on some song packages which will be available shortly on the sister site to this one, www.souffler.co.uk. This an example of one of these.

They were developed as part of the singing and Mfl project I ran recently at a Derbyshire primary school.

The song was written for a yr 4 class who were studying pets/animals. I wanted to produce a song that covered a phonic pattern and that had a silly side to it. All the animals are 'enchanted', unlike other animals and are up to silly things.

It's called "Le Chateau Charmant" and tries to cram in as many animals who have the 'ch' phoneme. Here is a snippet:

Every song pack will include the following resources

 * mp3 tracks

* powerpoint presentation of the song

*performance and karaoke videos of the song

* Smart Notebook and Promethean flipchart teaching versions of the song with all parts broken down into practice sections

* Phonic work based on the song with phonic wall displays

* pdf print outs of the song for Wall Displays / flashcards

* Word versions of the lyrics in French and English

* Teaching tips

* Weblinks to sites to support singing and languages

* Integrated Task Magic support files

Here is a page from the Smart Notebook file

 
 The initial findings of this project are that introducing phonic patterns via songs is a very powerful and speedy way to fix the sound of the language married to its written form. Within 3 x 30 minute sessions these yr 4 pupils were pronouncing the lyrics perfectly as they read them aloud from the screen, a feat my former GCSE oral students would have found hard to match.