Using a song in class

I like to use country music with students because of the story element.  I've also found that country music, being old-fashioned to today's students, is neutral territory.  Many young students identify with a certain kind of music and may have an almost tribal reaction to music that represents another type of student.

This is a description of how I use Saginaw, Michigan by Lefty Frizzell in the classroom.  I begin by telling the students the story of the song.  Then I give them the following vocabulary list to help them recognize words they would hear in the song and might not know.

a claim, hard-working, wealthy, good enough, to claim, to dig, ground, to pray, to strike it rich, father-in-law, greedy, It serves him right, to miss, least of all, newly-weds, ashamed

I explain each word, give an example and use these questions for PQA:

1. Who has a claim to this bag?

2.  Are you hard-working?  Is he?

3.  How could you become wealthy?

4.  Are you good enough in English to go to the U.S.A.?

5.  Do you claim to be a good student?

6.  Where did you dig?

7.  What have you found in the ground?

8.  When/where do you pray?

9.  How could you strike it rich?

10.  Where could you hit a strike?

11.  Do you know your future father-in-law?

12.  Are you greedy?  Do you have greedy friends?

13.  When did you think, "It serves me right"?

14.  Do you have friends who are newly-wed?

15.  When was the last time you were ashamed?

16.  Who do you miss?

17.  What school subject do you like least of all?

I don’t expect students to retain all of this vocabulary.  But when they listen to the song, they will recognize the words they hear and find the song easier to comprehend.

I then ask them to listen to the song and fill in the blanks in a cloze exercise.

I was _____________ in Saginaw, Michigan.

I grew up in a ________________ in Saginaw Bay.

My dad was a ___________, hard-working Saginaw fisherman.

Too many __________he came home with too little pay.

I loved a __________in Saginaw, Michigan,

The _____________of a wealthy, wealthy man.

But he called me, "that __________of a Saginaw fisherman,"

Not ____________ enough to claim his daughter's hand.

Now I'm up here in __________, digging around for gold.

Like a crazy fool I'm ___________ in this frozen ground so cold.

But with each new ___________I pray I'll strike it rich, and then

I'll go back _____________and claim my love in Saginaw, Michigan.

I wrote my love, I wrote my love,

In Saginaw, Michigan, Saginaw, Michigan.

I said, "Honey, I'm coming home, ___________wait for me.

And you can tell your dad I'm ___________back a richer man.

I hit the biggest strike in Klondike history.

Her dad met me, her dad met me,

In Saginaw, Michigan, Saginaw, Michigan.

He gave me a great big party with________________.

Then he________, "Son, you wise, young, ambitious man,

Will you __________your father-in-law your Klondike claim?"

___________he's up there in Alaska, digging in the cold, cold ground.

The greedy fool is looking for the gold I never_____________.

It serves him right and ______________here is missing him,

Least of all the newly-weds of Saginaw, Michigan.

We're the happiest man and wife in Saginaw, Michigan.

He's ashamed to show his face in Saginaw, Michigan.

A cloze exercise is not a listening test; it’s listening practice.  The blanks should always correspond to well known vocabulary.  The difficulty is in recognizing words that the students already know when they are sung.  For instance, in this song students may not recognize “little” as the singer pronounces it. As they learn to identify words that are not spoken as slowly and carefully as they are in a classroom, they will become more confident.

When the students have filled in all blanks, we can then discuss the story.  Here are some questions that can get the conversation started.

Where was the singer born?  Was his father a policeman or a fisherman?   Whose daughter did he love?   Was the girl's father rich or poor?  Did the girl’s father want him to marry her? Where did the boy go?  What was he looking for? Where was he digging?  What did he pray every day?  Who did he write to?  Was he coming home a poor man?  Who met him?  What did he drink? What did his father-in-law want?    Who did he sell his Klondike claim to? Where did his father-in-law go?  What is his father-in-law doing? Who is happy?  Who is ashamed?  Is the singer an honest man?

In some classes I found it useful to use the song to work on the following structures:  too many – too few – too much – too little - not good enough.

Here are some suggestions for PQA with these structures:

I have too many cats.   How many cats do you have?  Too many or too few?

How many classes do you have on Friday?

How many euros do you have ? pairs of shoes? Pairs of jeans? Video games?

I have too much work.  How much work do you have?  Too much or too little?

I have too little time.  How much time do you have to play?  Too much or too little?

Money?  Who has too much money?  Who has enough money?

Are you wealthy?  Are you wealthy enough to buy a Ferrari?

Are you old enough to drive a Ferrari? Are you tall enough to play basketball?

Are you strong enough to play rugby? Are you fast enough to play soccer?

Are you intelligent enough to play video games? 

The answer to most of these questions should be yes.  The teacher can then say, “I’m not tall enough to play basketball.  I’m not fast enough to play soccer, etc.

Who likes cats?  Who loves cats?  Who adores cats? Where do you live?  How many cats do you have?  Too many or too few?  

If you have a student who adores cats, you can then lead into the following story, adapting it to your class.  Everything which is underlined can be changed.

There was a boy who had too many cats.  Name?  Where did he live?  How many cats?  73.  Too many or too few?  How many cats did he have?  How many baskets did he have for his cats?  19  Too many or too few?  Did he have enough baskets?  How many mouths did he have to feed?  Did he have enough food?  Too much or too little?  Why?  Did he have too little money or too much money to feed 73 cats?  Was he rich?  Was he wealthy?  Who wasn't wealthy?  He wasn't wealthy enough to feed 73 cats.  Then one day he broke away.  Where did he go?  He came to Agen.  Who did he meet?  He met Camille.  She loved cats, but she had too few cats.  She said, "Will you give me your cats?"  He gave her 54 cats.  She was very happy.  She was the happiest girl in Agen.  Too many or too few?  Enough.  He was happy.  The happiest boy in Z.  He was wealthy enough to feed 19 cats.  He had enough baskets for 19 cats.

After you have created the story with your class, you can ask them to retell it, writing the numbers on the board and pointing at them when the students need to say them.  TPRS teaches numbers in homeopathic doses, so every story should contain numbers.

The following lesson can be reading the story as you have typed it up.  Or simply reading the lyrics to the song.  It would be interesting to try to create a parallel story about a student as you read the lyrics.

Writing a film

Films are input.  When we have the subtitles on the screen, a film is simultaneously oral and written input because the students are hearing and reading at the same time.  With the teacher’s help, the input becomes comprehensible.  Eventually we will want some output from the students.

It is important not to push the students to produce before they are ready, but if the class has been engaging, most students will speak spontaneously to give their opinions about the characters and their problems.

How can we also invite them to write in the target language?  The first step would be a dictation.  In Tprs in a Year Ben Slavic explains how to give a dictation.  The classic French dictation is repeating the text, sentence by sentence, three times.  The first time the students listen to be sure that they understand.  The second time they write and the teacher includes the punctuation.  The third time they reread and correct.  The dictation should consist of phrases from the film, sentences that they have read as subtitles.  Frequent dictations will give them confidence in their ability to write the language and help train their inner monitor to avoid the most common errors.

The next step would be to ask them to write a summary of a scene that has been studied in class and summarized orally. An excellent exercise to prepare weak students for a written summary is to ask the class to do a chain summary.  It is a good idea to begin with the student that has the greatest difficulties, asking him to say what happens first in the scene.  He produces one sentence.  You ask the student next to him to repeat the sentence and add a phrase about what happens next.  The third student repeats the two previous sentences and adds one.  And so on until the scene has been summarized.  You can refuse some phrases if the student skips actions that are important.  If the student makes a minor grammatical mistake, you “echo” what he said, but correctly, and ask him to repeat it again, as if he said it correctly the first time.  Sometimes they need help, which you give them.  

By the time you reach the last student, the class will have heard the summary repeated as many times as there are sentences.  Then you ask them to take out paper and pen and to write the summary.  They should have little difficulty doing it.  Often you’ll see them looking around the room, because looking at the student who first said a sentence will help them remember what the sentence was.

When students are more confident about their ability to summarize a scene, you can ask them to do it in class.  Announce that their compositions will be graded by quantity.  Set the number of words you want and every student that writes something coherent and reaches the minimum number of words will have 10 out of 10 points.  Just as we want students to speak without stopping to think about every word, we want them to write in the same manner.  I have seen fifth year students so paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes that they took an hour to put forty words down on paper.  The technique of fluency writing has been around for a long time and has proved its usefulness.  Once students actually start to “let it flow” and write spontaneously, you will be able to see that they make far fewer mistakes than before when they sweated blood over every word.  Why?  Simply because fluency writing lets their subconscious kick in with its memory of having heard the correct form.

I collect their texts and take them home.  I read through them very quickly, underlining in green everything that is correct and acceptable.  After many years I realized that the reason students repeat the same mistakes over and over again is that we UNDERLINE MISTAKES IN RED!!  So what does the student’s visual memory remember?  The things that were underlined in red, duh! I make no comments and give no hints about what’s wrong with parts that are underlined.  I give the grade of 10/10 to all who have the required number of words and grade the others in proportion.  If they wrote 50 words instead of 100, they have 5/10.  (By the way, they are responsible for counting their words.  If they don’t, they have to settle for my rough estimate.)

I then return the texts to the students and ask them to improve them and recopy them to hand in the following week, for another grade, based on quality this time.  I ask them to hand in both the original draft and the clean, corrected and recopied version.  So when I correct them, I can see which mistakes they were able to correct on their own, and which I need to work on in class.

My colleagues said that students who came from me “knew how to write”, but they also thought that my system involved a double correction and was too much work.  I found that “quantity” grading was fast and easy, because I made no comments.  And the “quality” grading was far less laborious because the students had eliminated a lot of mistakes, and I simply rewrote the remaining errors so they would have an example to guide them in the future.  (When I first started teaching, I spent hours correcting papers with notes and explanations for every mistake.  But I soon saw the students whose papers I’d labored over longest glancing at the grade and wadding up the paper without reading any of my comments.)

I don't write anything but the grade on my students' papers.  If I write anything, it should be in the target language.  I think I did this once, writing a commentary meant to be encouraging at the top of each paper.  After I had handed back their papers, I soon found half the class lined up in front of my desk, wanting a translation!  What I have been doing for many years is using stickers bought in a teacher supply shop in the States on all papers with a passing grade.  My kids get a big kick out of them, even the twenty year olds in a post bac class; the expressions are always positive and it's genuine American culture. 

Films and embedded texts

Laurie Clarq has developed a technique that she calls « embedded texts » which helps students to develop their reading muscles.  She explains it on the site Hearts for Teaching at http://www.heartsforteaching.com/

 

To make an embedded text you can either start at the bottom and develop more complicated texts, or start at the top with an authentic text and progressively simplify it.  The idea is to give your students a simple text that they have no difficulty reading before giving them a slightly more complicated version that contains everything that was in the first reading.  Then you present a third version that is far more complete, but still contains everything that was in the second reading.  Laurie occasionally uses four or more versions of the same text.

One of the first times that I used her idea, I spent the class hour working on Versions One and Two, and didn’t have time for Three.  So I suggested that the students read it at home in preparation for our next class.  I got a few automatic groans when they saw that Text Three was a full page.  But then one boy glanced over it and saw that he knew almost all the words.  “Hey!  This is easy!” he said and made my day.  

 Embedded texts are like training a horse to jump by raising the bar just a little bit every time.  Each text is just a little more difficult than the one before.  By the time you’ve read and circled the structures and vocabulary in the third version, the students can sight read without any painful decoding. 

It might seem that students would get bored with reading the same thing three times, but this has not been my experience.  Each new version adds new details and new information.  I also believe that the students don’t get bored because they feel successful in being able to read a large amount of text without being stumped every other word.  Success is always motivating. This means that the teacher has to carefully dose the difficulty of each version, but it can be done when you know your students well.

I use embedded texts with films.  They are particularly useful to introduce a scene that has a lot of complex dialog.  I begin with a short summary of the scene and just the essential details.  We read the text in class.  The students translate sentence by sentence and I step in whenever there’s something they don’t know how to translate.  We discuss the summary in the target language and I may digress with some PQA if there are words and structures that make it interesting.

Then I add a few more details and a few more sentences and we read Version 2.  Once again we translate it together.  Working with small groups of weak students, I did this as a whole class activity.  Some teachers might prefer to have the students translate it in groups or even in pairs.  We then discuss the new information.

Finally I use Version 2 as the framework for a fairly complete summary.  When we have read and discussed the last version of the embedded text, most of the structures feel familiar to the students and they are comfortable that they understand it.

We are then ready to watch the scene, which is a kind of Version 4 of the embedded text.  We can discuss it without having to explain vocabulary, so the students are able to concentrate on the deeper meaning and implications of the scene.  Occasionally, with a good class and a film that was taken from a book, we can then move on to the original written passage.  This is a good way to show students that they are capable of reading authentic texts in English – or whatever your target language is.

Here are three embedded texts of a scene from the movie The Mighty:

I

A Doghouse boy put a purse in a sewer grate.  Kevin went to Max’s house and woke him up.  They went out to get the purse back.  Freak opened the sewer grate with a rope tied to a fire escape.  Max climbed down into the sewer. The purse was in the sewer.  He climbed out and gave the purse to Freak.  In the wallet there were a lot of dollars.  Freak and Max were ambushed by the Doghouse boys.  Blade told them to give him the purse.  Max told Freak to give the purse to Blade.  But Freak refused and climbed up the fire escape.  Blade was going to hit Freak with chains.  Max lifted up the sewer grate and ran at Blade and his gang.  The Doghouse boys ran away.  Freak wanted to give the purse back to its owner. 

II

Kevin saw one of the Doghouse boys put a woman’s purse in a sewer grate.  At night he went to Max’s house and woke him up.  He told Max to get dressed.  They went out to get the purse back.  Freak was able to open the sewer grate with a rope tied to a fire escape.  Max climbed down into the sewer where there were rats. The purse was covered in slime.  He climbed out and gave the purse to Freak.  In the wallet there were a lot of dollars and a woman’s driver’s license.  Suddenly  Freak and Max were ambushed by the Doghouse boys.  Blade told them to give him the purse.  Max told Freak to give the purse to Blade.  But Freak refused and climbed up the fire escape.  Blade was going to hit Freak with chains in order to get back the purse.  Max lifted up the sewer grate and ran at Blade and his gang.  The Doghouse boys ran away.  Freak wanted to give the purse back to its rightful owner. 

III

 

Kevin was in his mother’s car when he saw one of the Doghouse boys steal a woman’s purse and put it in a sewer grate.  That night he went to Max’s house and woke him up.  He told Max to get dressed like a knight.  Their quest was to get the purse and give it back to the woman, its rightful owner.  Freak was able to open the sewer grate with a rope tied to a fire escape.  Max climbed down into the sewer where there were rats. He said that he didn’t like rats.  Freak told him that rats don’t like Max.  The purse was covered in slime.  Max climbed out and gave the purse to Freak.  In the wallet there were four hundred dollars and a woman’s driver’s license.  Her name was Loretta Lee.  Suddenly  Freak and Max were ambushed by the Doghouse boys.  Blade told them to give him the purse.  Max told Freak to give the purse to Blade.  But Freak said, “No.”  He climbed up the fire escape.  Blade was going to hit Freak with chains in order to get back the purse.  To protect Freak Max lifted up the sewer grate and ran at Blade and his gang.  The Doghouse boys were frightened.  They were afraid of Max.  They ran away.  Freak said that Max was awesome!