Unlock the Power of Music in ELT: Explore Creative Teaching with Songs
Welcome to the Song Activity Factory, your ultimate destination for harnessing the power of music in English language teaching (ELT)!
Dive into a world where creativity meets innovation, offering you an array of teaching ideas, resources, and inspiration to infuse your ELT practice with musical innovation. Whether you’re facilitating lessons in a virtual classroom or a physical one, discover how teaching English with songs transcends traditional methods, offering more than those BORING just gap-fill exercises. Explore our previous posts for a treasure trove of unique approaches and dare to integrate something new into your lessons!
Exciting news for this week – Song Pieces returns!
Experience the thrill of this fast-paced activity, perfect for injecting a burst of energy and fun into any classroom situation—be it a review, warm-up, consolidation, or just a simple reward.
Description:
In this ELT song-based activity, students WORK in teams (or individually), LISTEN to 5 different short song extracts (Hollow Coves – Photographs; Dean Lewis – Trust Me Mate; Liam Gallagher & John Squire – Just Another Rainbow; NSYNC – Better Place and Sir Chloe – Seventeen), and IDENTIFY different things like verb tenses, vocabulary, comparatives, etc, in each one.
OBS: This lesson plan was made for ONLINE TEACHING, but it can be modified for face-to-face instruction, as well.
Language level: (A2, B1)
Learner type : All ages
Skills : listening and writing
Grammar : Present Continuous, comparative adjectives, prepositions & colors
Materials : YouTube Video
Duration: 15 – 20 min
Downloadable Materials: instructions.pdf
STEP-BY-STEP LESSON PLAN
Step 1
Divide students into pairs or trios (it can also be done individually, depending on the number of students), and tell them they are going to listen to various extracts of songs and in each one they have to listen to different grammar structures and write them down on a blank sheet of paper.
Before playing each extract, say what you want the students to listen to and make sure they know it. In order to do that, ask them if they can give you examples of the words they must listen to.
Example: Students, in this first extract, you have to listen to a frequency adverb! Do you remember what this is? Give me some examples.
Step 2
Tell them they have 3 chances to try to get the right words or grammar structures. Then, play the first song and pause on the screen to reveal what they are supposed to listen for in the song extract. Make sure they know what they are supposed to identify by asking them to give you examples of the structures and writing them on the board.
They will have 3 chances as each song extract is recorded 3 times in a row before the next one (play more times if necessary). As they listen to the extract, they must write down the answer for the first song
Step 3
Check what the teams wrote down (you can use the chat feature of the application you’re using with your online students. ex: in-meeting chat in zoom , and ask them to use it to send you the answers.
Assign points. (1 for each right comparative, if there is more than 1 item in the recording)
Step 4
Repeat steps 2, 3, 4 for the next song extracts. The team with more points, in the end, is the winner!
Song Activity Factory 
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