Using Songs to Teach English: 9 Proven Methods

A 2010 study by Claudia Smith Salcedo found that beginner Spanish students who heard a text as a song recalled significantly more of it than students who heard the exact same words spoken. The song group also reported the words looping in their heads for hours afterward — the “din” that Stephen Krashen linked to language acquisition. That is the real argument for music in the classroom: it isn’t a reward for finishing the worksheet, it’s a delivery system that makes language stick. The trick is knowing what to do once the music stops.

Why Using Songs to Teach English Works So Well

Songs do three things a coursebook dialogue can’t. They lower the affective filter — students who freeze during a speaking drill will happily mumble along to a chorus because the group carries them. They deliver massive repetition without feeling repetitive; a hook repeated eight times is eight exposures to a grammar pattern, and nobody complains. And they encode rhythm and stress, the parts of pronunciation that textbooks flatten into silence.

There’s a memory angle too, and it’s the strongest case for using songs to teach English rather than just playing them. Melody acts as a scaffold for words, which is why you can still sing adverts from your childhood but can’t remember what you had for lunch on Tuesday. When you tie a target structure to a tune, you’re borrowing that same hook. This is really just comprehensible input wearing a catchier outfit — the language arrives in a context that’s meaningful, repeated, and slightly above the student’s current level.

How to Choose a Song That Actually Teaches

Most song lessons fail before the first note, because the teacher picked a track they personally love instead of one the students can access. Clear vocals beat clever lyrics every time. A slow ballad with a strong singer will always outperform a fast rap, no matter how much the class begs for the rap.

Run any candidate through four quick checks. Can you actually hear the words without the lyric sheet? Is the language roughly at or just above your class level? Does the song repeat a structure you’re teaching — a tense, a set of question forms, a batch of vocabulary? And is the content clean enough that no parent will email your director? If a song fails any of the four, keep it for a rainy Friday and find another. A predictable, repetitive song is a gift here, not a weakness — the same quality that makes pop music forgettable makes it teachable.

9 Ways to Use Songs to Teach English

The gap-fill is where most teachers start and, sadly, where most of them stop. It works, but a song can do far more than test whether students caught the missing word. Here are nine techniques, running roughly from receptive to productive, so you can push the same track deeper across a week.

1. The Gap-Fill (Cloze) Listening Task

Blank out eight to twelve words on the lyric sheet and have students fill them as they listen. The skill isn’t guessing — it’s training the ear to catch words inside connected speech. Blank rhyming words for lower levels (they’re predictable) and function words like prepositions for higher levels, where the challenge is real.

2. Lyric Strips and Sequencing

Cut the lyrics into strips, hand each pair a shuffled set, and have them put the verse in order as the song plays. It turns passive listening into a race and forces students to track meaning across whole lines. This jigsaw approach works brilliantly for storytelling songs where the order actually matters.

3. Dictation and Dictogloss

Play the chorus twice and ask students to write down every word they hear, then compare in pairs and rebuild the text together. Dictogloss surfaces exactly which sounds your class can’t parse — you’ll see the same three words wrong on every sheet, and that becomes your next mini-lesson.

4. Vocabulary and Collocation Mining

Give students the full lyrics and a highlighter. Ask them to pull out every phrase they’d use in real speech, then teach the collocations rather than isolated words. A line like “I’ve been holding back” carries a phrasal verb, a tense, and a natural rhythm all at once — worth ten flashcards.

5. Grammar Spotting in Context

Pop lyrics are stuffed with target grammar hiding in plain sight. Adele’s back catalogue alone could teach the entire second conditional. Have students hunt every example of a structure — past simple, present perfect, conditionals — then explain why the songwriter chose it. Seeing “if I were” sung by someone famous beats a grammar box every time. Pair this with your usual drilling techniques once the pattern is noticed.

6. Pronunciation: Stress, Linking, and Connected Speech

This is where songs are irreplaceable. Music forces the natural stress-timed rhythm of English onto the singer, so “gonna,” “wanna,” and the swallowed weak forms that confuse learners all show up loud and clear. Clap the beat, mark the stressed syllables on the lyric sheet, and have students shadow the line. For finer work, pair a song with your minimale par practice to lock in tricky vowel contrasts.

7. Action Songs and TPR for Young Learners

With children, movement is the lesson. Total Physical Response songs — the ones with actions for every line — let young kids show comprehension before they can produce a word. “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” is a vocabulary test disguised as a game, and it never gets old with the under-eights.

8. Karaoke and Shadowing for Fluency

Once students know a song, strip the vocals or drop the lyrics and let them sing it. Karaoke removes the fear of speaking because the melody dictates pace and no one is judged on grammar mid-chorus. Shadowing — singing along a half-beat behind the recording — builds fluency and intonation faster than any repeat-after-me drill.

9. The Song as a Writing and Discussion Prompt

End the cycle by leaving the language behind and using the theme. What is the singer actually feeling? Would you give the same advice? Have students rewrite a verse, write the next chapter of the story, or argue a side. This is where a song stops being a listening exercise and becomes a reason to produce real language.

Songs for Young Learners vs. Adults

The same song rarely works across ages, and pretending otherwise is how you lose a class. Young learners want repetition, actions, and volume — they’ll sing the same chant forty times and want it again tomorrow. Build routines around a “hello song” and a “tidy-up song,” and the music becomes classroom management. For more on this, the fundamentals in teaching young learners apply directly to song work.

Adults need a reason. They’ll resist “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” but lean into a song that carries content — a story, an argument, an emotion they recognise. Choose tracks with something to say, treat the lyrics as a text worth discussing, and never make an adult do the actions. The teenage middle ground is trickiest: they’ll die of embarrassment singing aloud, so lean on gap-fills, lyric analysis, and letting them choose the track.

Common Mistakes Teachers Make with Songs

The biggest one is playing a song with no task attached. Music as filler teaches nothing — students tune it out like they tune out a coffee-shop playlist. Every song needs a job: listen for something, do something, produce something. The second mistake is choosing a song that’s too fast or too slangy, then spending twenty minutes explaining idioms instead of teaching the point you planned.

The truth is, most teachers who “don’t do songs” aren’t wrong about music — they’ve just been burned by a lesson that turned into a karaoke free-for-all with no learning in it. The fix isn’t dropping songs, it’s tightening the task and cutting the number of language points to one per lesson. One tense. One set of sounds. One batch of vocabulary. A song that tries to teach five things teaches none.

Building a Go-To Song Playlist

Keep a running list of tracks that have worked, tagged by level and language point, and you’ll never scramble for a filler again. Sites like LyricsTraining turn any music video into a self-marking gap-fill at four difficulty levels, which is a lifesaver for a last-minute lesson or a self-study task. Streaming apps make it trivial to queue a set and control the room’s energy.

If you want to see these ideas demonstrated, the BBC Learning English team walks through several song activities in the video below.

Start With One Song This Week

Don’t overhaul your syllabus. Pick one song you already know sits at your class’s level, choose a single language point, and build one clean task around it — a gap-fill, a set of lyric strips, whatever fits Monday’s lesson. Watch what happens when the same students who dread the speaking drill start humming the target grammar on their way out the door. That earworm is doing your revision for you, for free, all week — which is the whole point of using songs to teach English in the first place. Once you’ve seen it work once, the playlist builds itself. For the theory behind why this sticks, our guide to vocabulary teaching strategies pairs neatly with anything you pull from a song.

Kilder

1. Salcedo, C. S. (2010). The Effects of Songs in the Foreign Language Classroom on Text Recall, Delayed Text Recall and Involuntary Mental Rehearsal. Journal of College Teaching & Learning — the study showing songs beat spoken text for recall and trigger the “din.”
2. Using music and songs — TeachingEnglish, British Council — practical rationale and activity ideas for music in the language classroom.
3. The Teachers’ Room: Using songs in the classroom — BBC Learning English — video walkthrough of classroom song techniques.
4. Degrave, P. (2019). Music in the Foreign Language Classroom: How and Why? Journal of Language Teaching and Research — review of the cognitive and affective benefits of music for language learning.

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