How to foster EFL listening and speaking skills through songs, in the eighth grade in "Fray Vicente Solano" high school

Abstract

This research project was developed in “Fray Vicente Solano” High School. The purpose of the project was to focus the importance of music as a resource for teaching and learning English as a foreign language. We contributed this project and its results as a suggestion for teachers. We believe that teachers can use music as an important resource in the English classroom to practice listening and speaking skills with activities related with vocabulary and communicative tasks. Teachers can use songs to create a fun and interesting environment where teenagers feel free and motivated to participate in class through songs, while they are developing English language abilities and skills. This research contains four lesson plans in which students have to practice the present tense, the past tense, the use of the auxiliary verbs “can” or “can not,” the use of correct prepositions in sentences and daily activities. All these lesson plans were applied in the eighth-level courses, “A”,”B,” and “C”, during four weeks, five hours per week. In these classes, we used songs, tasks, and karaokes, to facilitate the learning of the foreign language. When we worked with these lesson plans, students feel motivated, interested, and confident in their English classes because the activities with music create a comfortable environment to make the teaching – learning process easier. As Villalobos emphasizes, music can help as comprehensible input for students, because it enables them to understand a foreign language better and acquire new rules, vocabulary, and pronunciation, as well as motivating learners and helping them to feel more comfortable (96). Finally, we can say that we got the objectives of developing the listening and speaking skills with songs in a valuable way.