Music and Games in EFL and ESL

The music and games workshop was held in Smith Hall, room 221 on Thursday, August 5, 2004 at 3:30. The tutor, Walt Babich, started this session by stressing the following points that music and games have in common:

• Both have the effect of taking stress out of the lesson.
• Both tend to create “flow” – a state of total involvement with the activity.
• Both tend to connect the learner with the language in a direct and personal way.
• Both can be used to stress accuracy in a “painless” way.

After this introduction, the workshop dealt with a pertinent question that has always been related to music in EFL and ESL: “How should a teacher choose music for the class?” The tutor’s answer to this question is that he mainly chooses the songs for “highlighting certain grammatical structures, for teaching new vocabulary found in the lyrics, for emphasizing dialectal variation found in the music, for allowing the students to construct meaning from the lyrics, and for focusing on phonology without the usual pressure and embarrassment that seem to go along with practicing pronunciation in class.”

When choosing a song, Mr. Babich recommends songs that are easy enough for the learners to understand most of the lyrics, but with enough new material so that students will learn something. He also recommends songs in which the singer’s voice is clear and in which the instrumentation does not drown out the singer.

To demonstrate what had been highlighted in the theoretical part of the workshop, several task-based activities were presented, practiced and discussed by the participants. Among these:

• Holy Cow! to teach some reductions and idioms such as:
  Wha’cha doin to me’: what are you doing to me?
  Walked out on me: abandoned me.
• In My Life (Lennon & McCartney) to stress: plurals and first person singular endings.
• What a Wonderful world used for teaching pronunciation: stress on the syllable before –logy, and for vocabulary: school subjects.

The second part of the workshop was devoted to games. The tutor pointed out that he mainly uses games to stress accuracy, and that he prefers games that require very little explanation and few materials. Because of time constraints, only the following two games were presented to the participants

• Going to Chicago: (to stress the correct use of the articles and expressions of quantity
• Body parts games: (to stress the correct pronunciation of plural endings.)

reporter:  Abderrahim Saadouni