ESL Best Practices
So far I have just been posting resources that I find helpful. But, of course, there is much more to teaching than these things. Here I explore the use of music in the ESL classroom. I’d love to read any comments on this post. I’d like to know how others are using music in their ESL classrooms.
In my search for ESL best practices I ran across a great article on music and the ELL learner. Unfortunately, I am one of those people who isn’t musically inclined. My first real appreciation for the power of music hit home as I was teaching phonics to a group of first graders in an immersion program. Using a set of phonics books with CD entitled “Sound Starters” by Elizabeth Love and Sue Reilly I sang along with my students as we covered the alphabet a to z. ESL kids who were otherwise quiet and unresponsive became animated and verbal! Finding that music can turn a dry and boring subject into an exciting activity, I made power point presentations to accompany each of these songs so that students could see and read the vocabulary as we sang along.
From my experience most ESL kids like music, therefore I strive to integrate it into all subject areas. My criteria for a quality ESL music video are:
- Easy to understand lyrics
- Slow, or at least not fast, lyrics
- Pictures illustrating what is being sung about
- Text so that students are able to read as they sing.
- The music should reinforce and help teach the curriculum.
Ideally, a large screen TV connected to a classroom computer would be employed for this. It’s not absolutely necessary though.
So, those are my experiences. This brings me to a digest found over at CAL, the Center for Applied Linguistics, entitled “Singable Books.” The article advances the idea that teachers should consider singing a book with their students, in addition to traditional shared reading. I especially appreciated the below points:
- ELL students who experience book singing acquire vocabulary at a faster rate
- Neuroscience has found strong connections between musical and linguistic processors in the brain.
- Some cultures value cooperative learning over individual displays of knowledge. (The nail that sticks out get hammered down)
These points all agree with what I’ve experienced, but I hadn’t thought about that third point in reference to music before. Makes sense. So how do we go about selecting singable books? The digest makes several suggestions:
- Illustrations should help convey meaning
- Language should match student levels
- Text should be related to the curriculum
- There should be a limited amount of text per page
- Look for rhyming
- Look for repeated grammatical patterns.
- Look for books that come with a CD and musical notation at the end.
- Find books that provide new lyrics for a known song.
If this has peaked your interest, the full Singable Books article can be read at the CAL website.