Learn English Through Music

Have you ever wanted to learn English in a fun, easy way? Do you like music? Would you like to learn English while getting to hear your favorite English songs? Well, now you can with Lyrics Training. This post will focus on reviewing the usefulness of Lyrics Training for ESL and EFL learners as well as teachers.  I recently gave a presentation on this application at TESOL 2015 in Toronto.

This website allows students to competitively do fill in the blank exercises from popular songs.

It has a  great search feature with many great songs from many genres, or you can browse a list of different musical styles. It even has movie clips and talks as well. 

It is a best to sign up for the website, as this allows you to keep your scores, invite friends, and compare your standing to other players.

After signing up, you can choose a difficulty level, which is based upon how many words that you want to be deleted. Beginner has 10% of the words removed, while Expert has all blanks.

The game has two types of games: write mode and choice mode. For ESL beginners, I recommend choice mode as it is much easier and allows for quick word recognition practice without worrying about typing ability.

As you play the game, if you do not get the answer, the time runs out and you have to start again. If you have to, you can get help by pressing the arrow button in right hand corner, but that lowers your score in the end. When you finish, you can see your scores on a dashboard with three tiers of scoring: the world, my country, and my friends. 

This is where I believe that this tool could be most helpful for teachers and students. Students could challenge each other to a "lyric off" and see who gets the highest score using the same modes. The teacher could post a link to a desired video and then have a game in which all students participate. 

Also, there is a sign up feature in which teachers could make their own lyrics training games. The one drawback to this is that the teacher cannot choose which words will be deleted. This is automatically done by the teacher. Also, if you want someone to review your lyrics before publishing, you will have to wait a while as they only have a few people working on the website. 

Overall, this is a great tool to engage, motivate, and challenge students to improve their English. I enjoy it and have used it to help create a listening lab at our school. Also, I plan to use it to help me to learn more other languages in the future!  Let me know what you think of it!