subject: How to Incorporate Songs into the French Classroom [print this page] How to Incorporate Songs into the French Classroom
If you're trying to make it fun to learn French in the classroom, there are materials that can help. Most of the materials on the market are really just variations on phrasebooks. They offer some useful elements, but they have some major drawbacks. One of the most significant is that everything is learned out of context. This transforms the student's learning experience into something that's more theoretical than it is useful. It's also the reason why there are many people in the world who took French in school, but don't remember a word of it.
If you incorporate songs in the French classroom, you're giving students a tremendous resource to learn from. Songs are much more interesting ways to memorize words and phrases than are rote exercises. When you learn from a song, there's the challenge of singing the melody, pronouncing the words correctly and putting it all together into something musical. All of these things offer a fun way to do the tedious parts of language learning, such as memorization, without them becoming unbearably dull. The words that students remember from a song are very likely to stick with them over time.
You can also use songs in the French classroom as a way to reach out to students who are very frustrated with their learning experience. For example, some students are very artistically inclinedwhich means they probably would like to learn Frenchbut they aren't particularly taken with lessons that require them to sit still and abstract for long periods of time. Letting them engage in something artistic makes use of their natural abilities and gives them a chance to shine. This is very ego-boosting and makes French something they want to learn, not something they have to pass.
Songs in the French classroom can be tied in to musical plays. There are some very good products on the market that feature this idea. When a song is part of a play, and the words are part of the song, everything has a context. A good deal of how we understand language has to do with context. In your native tongue, you can usually reconstruct an entire sentence from a portion of it by simply considering the context. This skill, when combined with music and an interesting story, can be encouraged in students as a way to help them learn.
welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net)
