Song and Music in Language Learning

Song and Music in Language Learning provides statistics to confirm the widespread and intensive dispersion of pop music, especially in English and among adolescents, and then proceeds to analyse the lyrics of 50 pop songs in a hit parade from September 1987. They are shown to be linguistically simple, conversational, and of high personal interest . A multidisciplinary gathering of evidence highlights songs' role in language acquisition and their potential for ideosyncratic use. A psychological model of songs is then proposed which typifies them as «ghost discourse», «adolescent motherese», and as being somewhat isomorphic to «inner speech». In the second part, chapters are devoted to the historical development of the use of songs in language teaching, their contemporary uses for a wide variety of goals and in a many different methodologies, the EFL published materials available, the arguments against their use, and the recent pedagogical trends which support their use.