How to choose and evaluate songs

This is probably the most difficult and the easiest problem at the same time. Firstly, it should be noted that there are not any strictly organised principles as to songs and chants. Usually, the essential vocabulary and structures that students will need to know are listened/ written down. As a result, we can have lexical and grammatical songs. The phonetic aspect is mentioned but not taken into consideration as a rule. Teachers of English as a mother tongue do not want to waste time, for their children can speak the language. Teachers of English as the second language are used to rhymes and tongue twisters. They have been taught correct pronunciation this way, so why not their students?

Another approach is to choose a song according to the level of learning: beginners, intermediate, advanced. Once again, it’s rather difficult to decide whether many of the songs are or aren’t suitable for one particular age level. To make the things still worse, we have to acknowledge that many songs are unsuitable for language teaching. It’s just because they have unnatural stress patterns or sometimes are pronounced wrongly to fit it with the tune. You should therefore bear in mind that the songs you choose for teaching should have words, which fit the tune naturally. Each take we mentioned brings us to a conclusion that there are different types of songs. The way we teach and the practice activities we do are going to depend largely on the sort of song we have chosen. However, although we may wish to use a few songs for listening purposes only, the majority of songs we will probably use for student participation. The following table can give us a tentative idea how to distinguish between different types of songs.