Teaching listening with songs

2.3 ACTIVITIES THROUGH THE UTILIZATION OF SONGS

Activities that can be carried out with songs in foreign language classes can be classified in three groups as pre-listening, listening and post-listening activities. Here, a teacher should carefully think about what a student will do before, while and after listening. Below are some recommendations regarding these activity stages and what kind of activities a teacher can use in these stages.

Pre-listening activities
At this stage, the teacher checks to see if the children are ready to begin the listening activity. According to Davenellos (1999), the goal of this stage is to grammatically, educationally, and psychologically prepare pupils for a topic. It is vital to introduce the topic, keywords, and grammatical structure before performing a song to students. To activate students' background information at this point, it may be appropriate to ask them to predict the theme of a song, brainstorm about it, present or discuss the cultural information contained in the song, or state the keywords and ideas contained in the song. Pre-listening activities help students understand why they are listening to the song and how to concentrate on the meaning of the song while doing so. Furthermore, it is possible to utilize songs by omitting a part of the lyrics and to conduct tasks in which students predict or determine the meaning of a word from context (Vandergrift, 1999). Sarçoban (2000) suggests discussing the song's topic, title, or story if one exists, informing students about the linguistic points to be examined, and utilizing a picture to introduce the song's theme as pre-listening activities.


Listening Activities
Listening activities are closely tied to the text, and students are expected to participate in them while listening. Students control their comprehension skills and focus on listening to the text during this listening process, which is guided by the teacher. According to Peachey (2003), students should listen to a song at least three or four times in order to become familiar with the singer's voice or the tempo of the song. Allowing students a brief length of time to read the questions they will answer while listening is also crucial prior to listening. In this stage, activities such as removing certain parts of the text which are related with the grammatical form, word or pronunciation type in question, checking the accuracy of the predictions made about the song before listening, ordering the lyrics of the song, answering multiple-choice or open-ended questions about the song, picking the words that students hear in the song from a long wordlist given before listening, pausing the song and asking students to repeat the last word they have heard or correcting lexical, grammatical or syntactical mistakes deliberately involved in the lyrics.