Monday 7 June 2010

Teaching Grammar Through Songs

I have to admit that I find teaching grammar a bit on the boring side and finding good examples of grammatical structures in interesting authentic text can be quite time consuming, so when I saw this lyrics search tool Lyreach I was instantly impressed.

All you need to do is type in an example of your grammar structure and you can then find it in a whole range of different song lyrics.


This links to the lyrics start to show beneath the search box as you type, and then you just click on the sentence to link to the correct verse from the song. You'll see the part of the song highlighted and there's a link to a clip from Amazon.



Unfortunately the clip is only the start of the song and may not have your grammar example in, but it is easy from hear to find the clip on YouTube or find the clip and the rest of the lyrics together using a tool like Tubeoke that matches clips to lyrics.

So now using these two easy tools you can find lots of authentic examples of your grammar points in song lyrics and create quick activities based around them. You could even paste the lyrics from the verse into Wordle and use it as a prompt to get the students to drill, memorize or review the verse after they listen.

So, who says technology doesn't save time??

I hope you find Lyreach useful.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

8 comments:

Claudia Ceraso said...

Hi Nick,

Technology saving time? I'd say you saved me the time to search for this. Exactly what I needed.

Thank you for this.

Claudia
@fceblog

Sue Lyon-Jones said...

Cheers for posting this, Nik!

I find teaching grammar pretty dull as well, & using songs can be a good way to spice things up.

I'm sure that both these tools will come in really useful & save time when I'm looking for a song to teach a specific grammar point, so thanks again!

Sue :-)

HelCol said...

This is brilliant! I too find teaching grammar dull and sometimes spend ages looking for songs with related grammar points. This will save loads of time. Thanks again.

Nicky said...

wow, very nice...one of the very few (out of the trillions that surface every week) web tools that i can honestly see the use and appeal of. thanks!

KALINAGO ENGLISH said...

Not to be redundant... but excellent tip, Nik :)

Nik Peachey said...

Thanks All

Glad this is useful and thanks for the positive feedback. It's always nice to know when I get it right.

Best

Nik

Anonymous said...

This is very cool. If only we could search for more general strings by using "I am *ing", for example.

Nik Peachey said...

Hi Kfbunny

You can do similar things to that with http://www.googlebattle.com and compare the use of say "I have" with "I am" and get links to the results in Google that help you find answers (a little like a concordancer). The problem is that it doesn't specifically give you songs. It's still quite an informative tool though. I wrote an article about it a while back at:http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/11/tool-for-comparing-words.html
Comparing the frequency of use and context can be pretty interesting.

Best

Nik