Writing Emails With A Song As Inspiration: An Activity Idea For Cambridge English: [First]

Most English language teaching professionals feel that English songs have a fitting place in the ESL/EFL classroom. However, trying to find a ready-made song activity which features neither an activity with an ‘ancient’ song nor the dreaded gap-filling exercise is time-consuming.

With this in mind, Song Activity Factory will start featuring posts on how to create different song activities with step-by-step suggestions, in a flexible template format, to facilitate and save precious time for busy teachers and ESL/EFL professionals.

Activity Idea 01 – EMAIL FEELINGS

How about preparing your students for the Cambridge English First (FCE) writing and speaking papers and, at the same time, providing some relaxing fun time with a song/music video? That’s what ‘EMAIL FEELINGS’ is all about.

Check Out The Video Tutorial For This Idea

ESL Activity Preparation

Preparation: Choose a nice song, especially one in which someone might be singing to another. Description: Students imagine they are the singer and write an email to the person he/she is singing to, translating the feelings in the song into written words. Variation: Students imagine they are the person the singer is singing to and write an email to the singer reacting to the song

How to Teach English with Email Feelings: Suggested Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1.

Ask a warm-up question, or choose one quote related to the topic of the song, and have students discuss it in pairs. After some minutes, have the groups share their opinions with the whole class.

Step 2.

Play the music video or the song you’ve chosen to the students

Step 3.

Have students talk about the video/song (what they understood, feelings, story, if the song matches the quote they discussed in step one somehow and why, etc) and then have them share with the whole class

Step 4.

Play the video/song again

Step 5

Tell students to imagine they are the person the singer is singing to and write an email to the singer reacting to the song. As a variation you can instead, ask students to imagine they are the person the singer is singing to and write an email to the singer reacting to the song

Step 6

This assignment can be done in class or for homework.

OBS: This activity works better if you have recently worked with the language and structure of writing emails for the Cambridge English First Exam (FCE).

For a sample of this idea applied to a song, see Song Lottery & Writing Emails