Hi everyone!
Today, I want to talk about a web site called Lyricstraining. Our teacher showed us this last week, and I found it quite interesting and fun. This web site helps you to practice your listening skills while learning pronunciation and different languages as well.
When I was in school, our teacher turned on the radio and played some song I had never heard before. In front of me, I had a sheet of paper with blank spaces that I had to fill in while listened to a random musical theme. I'm not going to lie, it was pretty boring as well as impersonal. I didn't understand the lyrics, the context and of course the song's meaning. I was completely clueless on how this could actually be effective learning. Now, you can ask the following: Isn't lyrics training the same thing? Yes, it is. However, don't blame on the tool, blame on the methodology.
Most of the time, there are perfectly good technologies that are used poorly. It is our job to find ways to make learning fun and effective to our students. For this reason, I believe that this technology can help students with their listening skills as wells as their pronunctiation and spelling. The most important thing is that they can choose any song they want. Thus, their interests are actually involved in the learning process. That's pretty neat, don't forget that your students are the main characters of the story.
Most of the time, there are perfectly good technologies that are used poorly. It is our job to find ways to make learning fun and effective to our students. For this reason, I believe that this technology can help students with their listening skills as wells as their pronunctiation and spelling. The most important thing is that they can choose any song they want. Thus, their interests are actually involved in the learning process. That's pretty neat, don't forget that your students are the main characters of the story.
Now, lyrics training is also about filling the blanks, something that has been used million of times with students, and it keeps failing in caughting out their attention. Mainly, because there is no connection between the song and students' personal interests.
Lyrics training gives students the posibility to choose any song they want.
To choose different levels of difficulty.
Students can choose the modality of the game.
Students keep a score of their hits and fails.
Moreover, by using this web site you can foster self-learning since students can use it whenever they want. You can even upload material for them, in order to inmerse your students into the English language in a fun and creative way.
PLAYING LYRICS TRAINING
I would love to use lyrics training with little kids (6-8 years old). I have noticed that most teachers try to make their classes in English, which is perfectly fine because students need to be exposed to the language. However, it would be a nice idea to complement it with this web site. Lyrics training can be used as a warm up activity to lead students into the English language.
For instance, let's work with the song "Let it go" from the original movie "Frozen". We can select the choice mode to make students start practicing their listening skills, then we can give meaning to the isolated words, and ask students if they know what they are (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, etc) By doing this, we can start learning the way words can be classified, and next time we can change the choice mode in order to practice spelling. Moreover, students can express their opinions about the movie and the main topic that was exposed in it. The posibilities are many, it is our job to make something good out of every new experience. Don't forget to ask students their thoughts, and how would they improve the activity, if needed.
LIMITATIONS
As all the activities, if it gets too repetitive, it will get boring too. The idea is use the tool but not exaggerate with its usage. Complement your classes with the web site and upload fun and creative materials for your students. Remember it all starts by yourself!
Cheers to all of you!
