Songs as an English learning mechanism

Today I would like to write about an experience that I had as an English teacher trough my last practice period. I attended to a CAES school which was located in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Valencia.

The students of the school where I attended are characterized by having a great diversity of students in their classrooms. More than 75% of its students are foreign, and only 25% of the students are of Spanish origin. Therefore, the main language used in the school is Spanish while Valencian is avoided and limited for just specific subjects. Anyway, what I cared more were the classes of English, so I decided to ask if I could attend the classes of Joan, the English teacher of the school. Joan, very friendly, didn’t put me any problem and allowed me to assist to his English classes.

On those English classes I learnt a lot of things, but today I would like to comment one methodology that let me impressed because the students were able to learn new English words while they were enjoying what they were doing. The process consisted in learn new English words related with the vocabulary of the Unit that they were studying while they sang. The process was the following. In the first place, Joan distributes on a sheet of paper with the song so that they become acquainted with her first. In second place they sang and analyse the new vocabulary words appeared on the song. Thirdly, the students translate the new words and decide a gesture that represents the new word, for example, with the word "strong" we make force with the arms. And finally, the students sang the song making the different gestures for the different words as we all decided before together. With that method, the students were learning new words without realizing, and it is something remarkable, because we are talking about a CAES which is a type of school where the students always suffer learning difficulties.

Besides, while they were learning new vocabulary and they were creating new vocabulary sheets trough the different units they used to play a game at the end of the class. The game was called the “Vocabulary game” and consisted in that one of the students had to go out on the board and make a gesture of any word studied in class, while the other students had to guess which word was the one that the student was representing.

To sum up, I would like to thanks Joan for letting me assist to his classes because it has showed me that there are different ways to teach English beyond the traditional ones. It is going to sound strange, but I had to do more translations from Valencian to Spanish than from English to Spanish, and this is something that corroborates the effectiveness of the method.