Grammar Songs and Raps gives you 28 original songs and raps for the ELT classroom with a special focus on supporting the teaching of grammar; they are presented on two audio CDs together with teaching notes and two photocopiable handouts per song.
The songs and raps cover a range of structures for beginners and elementary students (Al and A2 according to the Common European Framework of References). Grammar Songs and Raps can be used as support material with any course book or language programme.
Grammar Songs & Raps
Young learners and early teens need a good balance of fun and language practice in order to be able to gradually develop language accuracy. Many — or even most — of them do not yet have a deep understanding of grammar rules.
That is why many colleagues look for fun ways of supporting their teaching and practising of grammar. At the same time, teachers notice that young learners and teens often show a remarkable ability to pick up and remember chunks of language they come across in stories, pop songs and other forms of texts that they like. Such chunks of language often contain important language structures. Therefore using songs to help students remember strings of words, sentence fragments and sentences can be very valuable practice.
Parents frequently comment that it is amazing how well their kids remember the lyrics of pop songs and regret that when it comes to ‘serious learning’ memory retrieval seems to happen far less easily.
This is not surprising. It’s a well-known fact that rhythm, rhyme and catchy tunes have a strong mnemonic function, and make language memorable — a phenomenon that is very successfully employed by people who design TV commercials and radio adverts.
The songs and raps in this book have been written in such a way that they contain both useful language (in the form of lexical chunks), and the mnemonic devices mentioned above (rhythm, rhyme and catchy tunes). This means that the chances are high that important language will be remembered well by the students, and more easily transferred to their long-term memory.
How to select a song?
The table of contents and the Quick Reference Guide (pp. 138-139) make it easy to select a song or rap according to the language you are planning to teach or practise.
Each of the songs or raps has a clear overview with a brief description of the language focus, the language level, a rough estimate of the time you will need to do the activities suggested, and the kind of preparation needed (for example which worksheets you need to copy).
This is followed by extensive teaching notes (‘In class’) with suggestions on how to use each song or rap over two lessons (‘Lesson 1’ and ‘Lesson 2’), each lasting between 10 and 45 minutes (‘Time’).
The teaching notes are arranged in clear and easy-to-follow steps, with drawings and examples of classroom discourse where necessary, as well as suggestions for extension activities. Answers to all activities and worksheets are included. The lyrics of each song or rap follow the teaching notes.
