Music and Song

Stand up, sit down

Aim of the activity

Word recognition.

Preparation

Pick out some words from a song the students haven't heard before and write them on aworksheet or on the board or on an overhead projector transparency.

Procedure

1) Ask the students to look at the words and guess what sort of song they are going to hear:pop or classic, male or female vocal, fast or slow, happy or sad, what instruments?2) Play the first few bars of the song and stop the tape. Ask the class whether it is the typeof music they expected to hear.3) Before they listen to the rest of the song, ask each student to choose five or six of thewords on their worksheet or on the board and write them down.4) Tell the students that they are going to listen to the whole song and that they shouldnumber their chosen words in the order they hear them.5) Now tell the students that they are going to listen to the song again and this time theyshould stand up each time they hear one of their words, and only sit down again when theyhear another of their words. They should continue standing up and sitting down each timethey hear one of their words.

Matching

Preparation and Procedure

Divide each line of the song into two halves.Leave the first half of each line in the correct order and mix up the other halves.Students match the two halves of each line as they listen to the song.

Wrong words

Preparation and Procedure

Write out the script of a song, replacing some of the words with substitute words which havesimilar sounds to the original words.Students underline wrong words as they listen to the song. Alternatively, add extra words and ask the students to cross them out as they listen.

Opposites

Preparation and Procedure

Pick out a selection of words from the song you are going to play and write down theopposites of these words.Read out these opposites and ask the students to write down the opposites of the words youread out.Now ask them to number the words they have written in the order they hear them in thesong.When they have listened to the song, ask the students if there were any of their words theydidn't hear. Discuss the notion of "opposite" and the fact that words have different oppositesdepending on the context.

Grammatical categories

Preparation and Procedure

Brainstorm grammatical categories for words. Ask the students to work in pairs and give one set of words taken from the song to each pair. Ask them to arrange the words into different grammatical categories.When they have done that, give them the script of the song with the words they havecategorised blanked out. Ask the students to put their words in the blanks, thinking about what sort of word is missingin each case.

Choose the correct word

Preparation and Procedure

Write out the script of a song and in each line of the song, choose a word and add anincorrect alternative to the word. Ask the students to work in pairs and give one copy of the script to each pair. Ask them to predict the correct word wherever there are two alternatives.Listen and check.NB This exercise is useful for "false friends" and other commonly confused words and verbforms.

Make up your own pop song

Preparation and Procedure

This exercise is suitable for a song which can be divided into verses. Ask the students to work in small groups.Give each group of students the first line of a verse of the song and some words from theverse. Ask them to write a verse of a song using the original words.