Friday 3 December 2010

Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus

A while ago I wrote a posting (Teaching Grammar Through Songs) on how you could search song lyrics for particular words or phrases, then find the lyrics and video to go with the song. In the posting, this involved using two different sites, but now I have found one site that does the whole thing.

The site is called Batlyrics. It's very simple to use. You just go to the search part of the site and click the 'Lyrics Words' search.

Then type in the phrase, structure or words you want to find in the text and you'll see the possible phrases from the lyrics start to appear.
Once you select one, you will be linked through to a page of possible versions of the song. Select the one you want and the video of the song should appear with the lyrics underneath.
This is a really fast way to find motivating listening materials for your students that deal with specific structures or vocabulary.

Using this with EFL students
  • You can get students to search for their own examples and learn the words.
  • You can use it as a way to find listening materials and copy the lyrics to make into classroom activities such as gap fill or reorganising the text.
  • You could cut and past the lyrics into this cloze test creator and you then have an interactive listening activity. Better still students could find there own songs and copy the lyrics into the cloze test creator so that they create their own personalised activities.
Batlyrics is free to use, but it does carry quite a lot of advertising though so be careful where you click.

I hope you find Batlyrics useful. Here you can find more EFL / ESL activities that use songs.

Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey

2 comments:

Helene said...

Powerful tool. This one works, too.

Your link to www.thebluesmaker.com is available for purchase, but not functioning as you had intended. Its just lyrics and video music...

I love the batlyrics. They're the bomb.

Nik Peachey said...

Hi Helen

Yes, sadly it looks like BluesMaker has died! I hope it's only temporary and I've contacted the company that produced it to see what's up.

Best

Nik