Sunday 19 February 2012

Sing an English Song


http://www.lyricstraining.com/play/9222/coldplay/viva_la_vida_live#.T2pidEh6Tc4.blogger
Coldplay - Viva La Vida (Live)
Last summer, my niece prepared to study abroad for high school.As an English language teacher,naturally, the responsibility of teaching her some spoken English fell on my shoulders. I taught her like I did with my students, and found it turned out unsatisfactorily.The main reason came from her low motivation for learning. Until one day, I found a method to change this situation: singing an English song!

As a teenager,she was a fan of Justin Bieber,and could sing along with the original vocals without any strain.At that time this method was just limited to her practising by herself.From now and then, she asked me some new words or expressions from the lyrics.

Now,with the help of Lyrics Training , Sing an English Song could be developed into a task for L2 students to learn English.

What is Lyrics Training?

It is an "easy and fun method to learn and improve your foreign languages skills through the music videos and lyrics of your favourite songs".Theoretically, you could learn to sing songs in 7 different languages, i.e.English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and German.The whole process is quite like the item of gap filling  in a language test.You could select different game mode according to degrees of difficulty.This website provides three levels:beginner, intermediate and expert.The more difficult, the more gaps you are supposed to fill.The song will be automatically paused when you fail to fill into the gap.

Advantages

Firstly, as it has been promoted, it is fun and could motivate L2 learner to learn English by listening a song. "Motivation is listed by Rubin (1975) among the three variables on which good language learning depends" (Ushioda 2008:19).

Secondly,this website could be used to design tasks in practising listening language skills and could enlarge students' vocabulary as well.

Limitations:

First,you cannot refer to a tip when you come across a word you did not remember.You could always open another website to google it; however, it makes the process less convenient. Second,this task will be more practical suppose teachers could integrate it with some other methods, like listening to authentic radio broadcasting, after all, you cannot expect only this method alone to learn real-life English. As you know, lyrics sometimes are more like poems which obviously could not meet sutdents' future academic needs for English.

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