That DOES Impress Me Much

Shania Twain and Christina Aguilera have been the unsung heroines of my teaching week, earning me some pupil respect and also providing the soundtrack to some quite entertaining lessons.

Music can be a substantial learning tool – the pupils here in France don’t seem to appreciate how much they are inundated with music in the English language and how they have consequently acquired hundreds of words and phrases through repeated listens.

Shania Twain
Image: Katherine Brock

Using different songs, particularly those which have been forgotten by French teenagers, can be a real treat, breaking the standard teaching methods. However, making sure that the class remember they are still working is a fine balancing act, particularly when Aguilera’s ‘Fighter’ reduces certain teenagers to air guitar heroes.

Nonetheless, finding appropriate singles, with great lyrics can be challenging enough in its own right, especially when trying to avoid repetitive choruses or explicit content.

Twain’s single “She’s not just a Pretty Face” came in useful when starting a unit on careers and future job prospects. The song lists a large number of professions, and the students had to try and note as many as possible, before repeating the vocabulary with a mean. For example, an astronaut is someone who goes to the moon.

This sparked conversation about career aspirations and we used the professions referenced in the song to come up with sentences about responsibilities for those people. For example, if I were a news reporter, I would have to interview people, or if I were a lawyer, I would help people in trouble. Twain’s song allowed me to explain a complicated grammar point here, introducing conditional tenses.

With a different class, we had started to investigate the use of comparatives and superlatives in English, which can be a rather dry grammar topic. Here, Christina Aguilera’s "Fighter" proved to be indispensable, reviving a class who had almost fallen asleep in the post-lunch food coma. The chorus has a number of comparatives (stronger, harder, faster, wiser), which the children had to listen out for and then also change these examples into superlatives.

Whilst the initial idea of comparative and superlative had not inspired the response I had hoped, this change of pace greatly lifted the mood and made sure the children were much more engaged by the end.

Music is certainly a universal teaching tool!