These are a set of 30 lessons designed to help ESL students improve primarily their listening skills, but they will also help with vocabulary, reading and conversation skills. This is achieved by listening to good music, and discussing the music and the events and ideas that inspired it.
Each lesson is based around a specific recording that is
found on YouTube. You can simply use YouTube in your lessons or you can buy the
music track or CD. You can also choose to find a
different rendition of the song, but if you do you will need to check that the
Text Completion Activity matches the version of the song you choose, as music
artists are known to customise songs to their own liking. The other activities
will also need to be checked.
Each lesson is based around a class time of 50 – 60 minutes
and has several activities. However you can easily adapt them to longer or
shorter periods by extending the length of each activity or alternatively omitting some of the activities, depending on the skills of your students
and the length of the lesson.
There are three suggested lesson outlines so that you can customise each lesson to different skill levels.
(Remember these levels refer to listening skill levels, not speaking skill levels. It is possible for students to have good speaking skills but poor listening skills.)
You may find that as the unit progresses and the skills
of your students improve and they complete activities faster you will be able
to change the lesson outline you are using to a higher skill level.
Each lesson includes the following activities, click on them for guidelines on how to run each activity:
- Between The Lines – Listening Comprehension Quiz; 10 true false questions based on the song lyrics.
- What’s That Word? – Text Completion Activity; the song lyrics with gaps for the students to fill in.
- Lyrics and Sense – Vocabulary Activity; the full song lyrics and sample vocabulary words and definitions.
- The Story Behind The Song – Reading Activity; a story about some noteworthy aspect of the song.
- In My Opinion – Discussion Activity; a selection of questions to stimulate discussion.
- Sing-A-Long With Me – just for fun; the sheet music of the song.
- Record sheets so you can record the students’ scores in the Listening Quiz and Text Completion Activities and chart the students’ progress over the course of study.
The List of Lessons is here.
This is a new course, I am aiming to upload five new lessons each week until I get a set of thirty lessons. When I reach that goal I will make the entire unit available for purchase in a PDF format ready for photocopying. Then I'll start another set of 30.
The PDF format will include the following resources:
- Everything on the website, 30 ready to photocopy lessons from this website in PDF format.
PLUS the following resources that are not on the website.
- Quick Answer Sheets for Between The Lines – Listening Comprehension Quiz.
- Quick Answer Sheets for What’s That Word? – Text Completion Activity.
- Sample answers for the In My Opinion – Discussion Questions; to support Beginner Level students.
- Two On My Own – Homework Activities.
- Quick Answer Sheets for On My Own – Homework Activities.
An Additional Note:
If you have suggestions for songs you would like to have
made into a lesson please put the YouTube link and your email address in the
comment section below. I'll send a free full lesson of that song to the first
person who gives me a good link to a particular song – as long as I like the
song. I'm not wasting my time writing lessons for horrible music. I will still continue to add music based listening skill lessons in sets of 30 after the initial set is completed.
One Final Note:
Please respect copyright. I put a lot of time into designing these lessons and testing the teaching methodology while I was teaching conversational English in Seoul Korea. I know it works. You are welcome to download and use the resources, that's why I posted them. If someone else wants to use them please direct them to the website so I can make an income through advertising :-) That's how I can afford to give the basic resources away for free.
The Really Last Final Note:
When I've completed the series of thirty lessons for listening skills I'm going to add a set of Pronunciation Skills. And after that there are some other lesson types I'm considering developing further If you think there is a skill that needs more resources developed please tell me about it in the comments below.
Cheers
Cat
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