subject: Helping Students to Learn French Songs [print this page] Helping Students to Learn French Songs
It's no secret to language teachers that music is of great educational value. One of the ways to tackle the challenge of French is to help students to learn French songs. If you remember learning French yourself, there's likely a memory in there about having sheet music placed in front of you and reading the text off of the page. This is a characteristic of older methods of teaching language, where reading, writing and speaking skills were taught all at once. Not all language teachers and educational theorists agree that this is the best way to help children learn French songs.
In some cases, it's more productive to skip the written materials and to concentrate on the singing and the music. This is the way that young children learn their native tongues, in many cases. In early schooling, for instance, teachers oftentimes lead children in songs without any printed lyrics or music. This helps them to concentrate on saying and understanding the words instead of forcing them to concentrate on both reading and speaking skills at the same time. It helps make the entire affair much less distracting than it would be otherwise and increases the speed with which children learn.
When you want to help children learn in the French classroom, it's important that they have motivation. There's nothing more tedious than staring at words on a page that make no sense to you and being expected to memorize them. In fact, if you want someone to learn to dread learning a new language, that's a fine way to go about it. Singing songs is much more fun and much more productive. By concentrating on simply learning to sing the words, you free up students to experience the language as they sing it, which makes it more personal to them.
Adding songs in the French classroom is a good way to keep the coursework interesting. Pronunciation and emphasis are taught naturally, as the song's melody will be built around the words. This makes it much easier to make sure that students are learning how to pronounce words like native speakers and, if they do decide to visit France, Canada or parts of the US, they'll find that they understand spoken French much better than they would if they'd just been staring at phrase books all day. This is a powerful tool for students and teachers alike.
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