Sunday, July 18, 2010

A Song to Motivate Students to Speak


Songs are helpful to introduce talking points in class. They are highly motivating and
great sources of vocabulary for students to widen their scope.


To introduce the topic "What's your favourite day of the week? Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Why?", I've chosen the song "Friday I'm in Love" by the band
The Cure.

As a warm-up I'm going to ask students the question: "What's your favourite day of the week? Why?". After some exchange of ideas, the students will receive a list of words and phrases from the song and while listening will write the day of the week connected to that word or phrase in the song. As a next step, they'll have to fill in the blanks in one part of the song.

As a follow up, students can either write a poem about their favourite day of the week, make a picture and describe it to the class or show a photo to the class that shows the activity they enjoy doing on their favourite day.

Here's the link to the tasks I've created: Friday I'm in Love by The Cure

Do you have other suggestions? I'd like to hear....

4 comments:

  1. In the same vein, you could use the song to review the days of the week: before playing and showing the wong, elicit from students what they associate with each day of the week. Then show the lyrics and ask students to compare with their original ideas. The follow-up could be in addition to what you already mentioned, asking them to "rewrite the song" using their ideas to replace the original lyric.

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  2. Thanks for your comment, Stephan! Thanks for your sound suggestions! They are great ideas to take advantage of this song in the classroom.

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  3. I love your ideas!

    If I was doing it a different way... I guess I'd go over the idioms and figurative language the song uses.

    Hold my head, break my heart, dressed up to the eyes, throwing out your frown, etc. I'd consider doing something with them!

    This isn't my favorite worksheet but maybe something like this: http://lteacherstoolbox.blogspot.mx/2013/06/english-idioms-phrasal-verbs-with-jose.html

    That is to say instead of giving them a list of phrases from the song I'd give them a list of synonyms (instead blue I'd say sad, instead of grey gloomy, etc.)

    Later we'd think of different ways to say those phrases.

    Eventually I'd give them the real words and try to match them.

    Finally we'd listen to the song for review.

    Awesome!

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  4. Dear Marisa,

    Thanks for sharing your ideas. It's a great pleasure to visit your blog. Thanks to the 33rd Blog Carnival:)

    I loved the post listening activity. I think that would help the students to use their creativity. By the way, I really enjoyed the song.

    Cheers
    Merve Oflaz
    www.merveoflaz.net

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