One way to accommodate learning styles of our students

lyricstraining is a website that I was introduced to in the second lecture of the first week of my second term work on the module ICT in ELT. I would like to share about how it works and recommend how we can best use it as a language teaching resource.

What is it?
 

 http://www.lyricstraining.com/

Lyricstraning is a free website that we can use to train our students music lyrics. It presents a video clip of music with the activity just below it. The description I found from the website states that ‘LyricsTraining is an easy and fun method to learn and improve your foreign languages skills through the music videos and lyrics of your favourite songs.’

How it works?

It is obvious that we have students with different learning style and strategies. One of the strategies that audio visual students use is to watch and listen to the language item that we want to teach them. lyricstraining website provides an opportunity for such students to practice the language. Secondly, it is common to see young and teenage learners with strong interest and passion to music these days. This can be an opportunity to help them to improve their language skills. Thirdly, music provide cultural environment of the target language. Therefore, lyricstraining can be an ideal opportunity for teachers to use to help them teach the target language with its flavour.

How can it be best used?

The website has exercise that is to complete a given music lyric. First of all the music records available in the site for exercise are labelled as Easy, Medium and Hard based on the difficulty level of the language they have.  In addition to this, as shown in figure 1 there are beginner, medium and expert level exercises for each song.  Once a student clicks the level of exercise he chose, the music starts to play. At the same time, he can see the lyric of the music he is listening with some words missing bellow the picture box. His task is to complete those missing words.  

There are some other bars that appear below the lyrics as shown in figure 2. These help the learner manage his progress.

Select Game Mode

> Beginner
Fill in the blanks (10%)
> Intermediate
Fill in the blanks (25%)

> Expert

Full lyrics

Figure 1: types of exercise based on the difficulty level of the language

Time   Words             Skips              Withdraw       Restart           Help

Figure 2: task bars below the exercise

How does it help language students?

Lyricstraning helps students to work on individually in familiarizing themselves to the actual language use. In relation to this, it can give them a chance to differentiate between formal and informal use of the target language. On the other hand, students can work in groups to discuss their results and challenges while doing the exercise. This kind of collaborative exercise can help students develop confidence and interest to work on their language development independently.

Furthermore, teachers can use such activities as gap fillers or main activities. They can also ask students to work on them and report their results. Still, it is fun if the teacher organizes competition between and among student. Meanwhile, Time management need to be a very important issue that need to be given attention while using this resource.