Natalia

La musique in my WL class – Part 1 – Song of the Week

A little background. Growing up in Soviet Union, I heard practically no foreign music on the radio or the two TV channels we had. However, my uncle was an electronic repair genius of the time and accepted payments of certainly pirated copies of recordings of mainly European artists on reels and eventually cassette tapes. Every now and then, he treated me with a few tapes and that’s how I got to jam to Modern Talking in my early teens singing along the refrains because I’ve been learning English at school since the age of 8. Fast forward to my college years. As I was studying French, we learned many songs in my phonetics course (think Joe Dassin and the like). In those pre-Internet years of post-Soviet Russia, one of my favorite pastimes was listening to a song and trying to transcribe the lyrics. Surrounded by several dictionaries, I would rewind that cassette tape many times until I could make sense of the line.


Song of the week – Mercredi Musique
It wasn’t until I started teaching outside of the textbook somewhere around 2009 that I revisited the idea of using authentic songs with my students on a regular basis. And even then, only my upper level kids would get exposed to French speaking artists. Then I joined Twitter in 2012 and realized that teachers use song of the week with beginning classes too. It took my new Spanish colleague @ADiazMora in the classroom next door to motivate me to try Music Wednesday. Actually, it was not her. My students would comment every Wednesday after hearing the Spanish song of the week through the wall, “Madame, how come they get to listen to music & have fun?” So I decided to try the French version of Mercredi Musique in the second semester. It’s still here. And after hearing my students say something along the lines of “That’s why I come to school on Wednesdays.” or Every. Single. Graduating. Senior comment on their exit survey that whatever happens, “Please, keep Mercredi Musique around forever for all future generations of French students” (yes, one of them actually wrote that).

And while the focus of this music tradition is constantly evolving, the process essentially is the same:

  • Artist : I introduce the artist and offer simple biographical information about them in comprehensible TL.
  • Anticipation (optional): Sometimes, I add screenshots from the clip to do some anticipatory activities such as working on simple structures to describe the characters of the storyline of the clip with Novices and making predictions with Intermediates.
  • Lyrics : I choose the part(s) of the lyrics that are most representative of the song and it’s message and students interpret the passages.
  • Viewing : We view the video clip together and listen to the song.
  • Opinions : Students evaluate the song with a set criteria, write and exchange opinions about the song orally. Here’s the document that is mentioned in the video below.

Here is a brief video I recorded last year that explains the process.

LOGISTICS. As I teach 4-5 different courses each year, all of my students listen to the same song on any given Wednesday. This means that I only prepare one song per week but do need to think how to differentiate it for Novice and Intermediate students. It also means that I have that song stuck in my head for the rest of the day 🙂

SHARING. Last year, I tweeted our song of the week every Wednesday with some extra links about the artist or the song and some teaching suggestions. This year, things have not been as regular as before because … f2f teaching in pandemic & some extra preps … but I’m still trying to get all my song suggestions out there, just not always on Wednesdays and not every week. Do search my Twitter timeline for #MercrediMusique hashtag to find all the posts from last school year. Here is the list from the fall of 2020:

Almost forgot! If you want to peruse my playlists from the last few years, here they are :

À SUIVRE : Part 2 – Song as a Lesson…

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