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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 1; January 03

Short Article

THE FUNSONGS APPROACH

primary, secondary and adult

by Charles Goodger, Italy

If this article interests you, Pilgrims offers courses in this area. Click here for more information.

Mime and music can help teachers to accelerate the learning process

All children enjoy singing and dancing. So when fresh new melodies and rhythms come together in songs that are fun and easy to learn, teachers have a powerful tool. Provided they possess certain properties, action songs offer a motivating and highly effective way of presenting new words and structures. As they involve the coordination of sung language with expressive gestures and movements, both the left and right sides of the brain (not to mention several intelligences) come “on-line” at the same time – resulting in what has been called a “PMA” (Permanent Memory Acquisition) experience.

Musical sensibility

In this digital world children are increasingly subjected to a mindless stream of pre-recorded music and noise of dubious quality (TV jingles, cartoon soundtracks, electronic games beeps, mobile phone rings, supermarket muzak, unintelligible pop songs, etc.) and this can have the effect of blunting their musical sensibility. In order to work properly and win the wholehearted cooperation of all the class, language-learning action songs need to stand up - and stand out - as highly valid and attractive musical creations in themselves. Banal or recycled melodies and arrangements may risk alienating some learners.

How the “FunSongs” approach came to be

As an entertainer and teacher trainer working with Primary School teachers and pre-teen children in Italy in the late nineties, I realised how few original action songs there were around. This spurred me to begin writing and experimenting original material - and led to the development of the “FunSongs approach”.
This starts with the musical sound of the sung voice in the context of action songs designed to highlight specific lexical fields and structures.

Examples of action songs, themes and language structures ·

  • Time to Play: the joy of playing, numbers 1 to 10, action verbs; ·
  • The Ladybird Song: mammals, reptiles and insects, the use of “can” and “can't”; · The Monster March: monsters from outer space, action verbs and parts of the body; ·
  • The Union Song: aspects of the European Union, the use of Let's and “has got”; ·
  • Robin Hood's Band: the story of Robin Hood, Maid Marian and possessive adjectives ·
  • The Millennium Song: what it means to be young at the start of a new millennium, countries and continents, the use of “who?” and the interrogative form of “to be”; ·
  • Our Autumn Song: returning to school after the summer, typically English traditions, colours and smells associated with Autumn, use of the imperative.

    Using action songs in class – The Monster March [ click here to access the song ]

    Teacher feedback and piloting action songs in our theatre shows has suggested the following method. Here is an example for “The Monster March”, available since September 2002 as a download package from the FunSongs website www.funsongs.co.uk.

    1. Know the song yourself!
      Make sure you are totally familiar with the song and its gestures before taking it into class.

    2. Get them thinking about the theme.
      This is a suggestopedia brainstorming technique first used by Dr. Georgi Lozanov. Tell your kids they are going to learn a new song about fearsome, zombie-like monsters from outer space who march around the countryside making funny gestures at children and animals.

      Divide the class up into groups of two or four and ask the groups to see which can come up (each group produces a written list) with the most number of words relative to the theme of the song. Here the target vocabulary family is parts of the body. Brainstorming can be done either in L1 or English, depending on level.

    3. 3. Present the action song.
      Put on CD track 1 and present the voice version of the song. Sing along and perform some of the simple gestures depicted in the coloured illustrations contained in the print-out.

    4. Teach the song line by line, action by action.
      You will be amazed how fast your children learn and memorise the words and gestures. Resist the temptation to distribute the lyrics sheet at this stage. Reading the words will only interfere with and slow down the learning process.

    5. Collective performance.
      When you feel they are ready, invite everyone to stand up, clear the room and practise the song including the dance steps as illustrated in the print-out, first with the voice version and then the karaoke one (CD Track 2). With the adult mother-tongue voices removed in the karaoke version, the children acquire the song for themselves – they gain confidence in their English as they sing unassisted.

    6. Reading practice
      Now distribute the lyrics sheets, put on the song and in silence get everyone to follow the words of the song with their finger.

    7. Activating the language
      Distribute photocopies of the lesson print-outs. These contain activities to help you reactivate and focus on specific aspects of the language (verbs, prepositions and nouns).

      Full details of FunSongs action songs, materials and theatre shows are available at www.funsongs.co.uk .



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