I spent much of my youth listening to hip hop, or, as it was called back then, rap music. This was long before MP3 players and long before you could Google your favorite song lyrics. It was also long before I knew anything about textual analysis, let alone before I thought about using unique words per n words as a measure of variety in vocabulary.
So, when Matt Daniels published this piece called The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop last month, it was both a flash back to the music of my youth and a flash forward to some of my current interests in corpus linguistics.
Daniels does a very nice analysis, so I won’t repeat much of it here. Just follow the link and scroll down to see the details. Be aware that some of the analysis incorporates a bit of slang that may not make it completely kid friendly.
Most noteworthy in the analysis are the two baselines of comparison: Shakespeare (5170 unique words per 35,000 words) and Herman Melville (6,022 unique words in the first 35,000 words of Moby Dick). Of the 85 rappers analyzed, 16 use a wider vocabulary than Shakespeare and 3 are above Melville. So, if you ever thought all hip hop was a simplistic art form, you may want to take another look. It’s amazing what an analysis of the data can show us.
Blue Water Silver Moon (Mermaid), 1991 by Kerry James Marshall. Photo copyright Dispatch.com.
I’m currently teaching one of my favorite classes: the Field Experience elective. In this class, I plan a series of field trips on and around campus so students can explore their community as well as English, the field they are studying.
One of our recent trips was to the Wexner Center for the Arts, the campus art gallery. The current show is Blues for Smoke, which explores Blues music as a “catalyst of experimentation within contemporary cultural production.” Works in the show span several decades and include a variety of media.
As part of our trip, I ask each student to identify a favorite piece, which we later discuss in class. One student chose the painting above. We had talked in front of the painting and I helped her understand some of the vocabulary in the information placard next to the work:
Marshall’s portrait of a mythical female nude lounging under the moonlight in a shimmering pond was inspired by a pulp comic book he was reading in the early 1980s. He notes, “Up until then, I had not considered that a black woman could be considered as a goddess of love and beauty. Even I took the classic European ideal for granted …. I wanted to develop a stylized representation of beauty that would be unequivocally black.”
We discussed how the painting includes faces from pulp romance novels that typify this “classic European ideal” for beauty and how the mermaid figure is beautiful and unequivocally black.
But what I interpreted as an interesting insight into the experience of African Americans was something that my student took to heart. The next day, she shared that this was her favorite piece because she, too, had felt the pressure to conform to this classic European ideal of beauty in her native China. For example, she and many of her friends stayed out of the sun so that her skin could be lighter and whiter. But, in this painting, she discovered that black is beautiful — an idea she could relate to and share.
I wouldn’t have guessed that this piece of art would strike this student in this way. But by exposing students to a wide variety of art, the opportunity for this to happen was created. Never underestimate the power of art. Or a good field trip.
In December 2012, Beck Hansen released an album called Song Reader in an extremely traditional way: on sheet music. Best known for genre-bending songs such as Loser and Where It’s At, Beck is going blazing another new trail by reaching back to a format that predates recorded audio. But, why?
Well, in an age of Instructables, MakerBots, and GarageBand, making things has never seemed less intimidating. And with YouTube, you’ve got a way to share your creations whether you’ve played a song on your piano or mashed up a couple of hit songs into something new.
These songs are meant to be pulled apart and reshaped. The idea of them being played by choirs, brass bands, string ensembles, anything outside of traditional rock-band constructs—it’s interesting because it’s outside of where my songs normally exist. I thought a lot about making these songs playable and approachable, but still musically interesting. I think some of the best covers will reimagine the chord structure, take liberties with the melodies, the phrasing, even the lyrics themselves. There are no rules in interpretation.
In education, we talk about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Beck has released an album that is completely open to interpretation and assembly by the user. By trusting and empowering his listeners to participate in his music, Beck has created something much larger than just twenty songs. He has created a community.
Anyone can post their version of one of these songs to Song Reader.net via YouTube or Soundcloud. As more songs are performed and uploaded, each work will form a kind of dialog and interaction with each one influencing the next.
Why mention this on ESL Technology.com? There are some parallels between this open approach to making an album and the open education movement. Trusting your students and empowering them to make decisions can be very scary — for both teachers and students. Letting students choose their own projects and then working with them to make sure the projects fit the curriculum is more difficult and time consuming, but it’s a process that can really infuse students with a sense of ownership over their work. Being responsible for their own learning is an important lesson for all students.
Opening your classroom to the real world (by making student videos and blog posts public, for example) can also be a scary, but rewarding, opportunity. Teaching in an open environment also means preparing students for the challenges in that real world — teaching strategies for dealing with griefers and phishing attacks, for example — which is probably some of the most useful learning they can carry forward from your classroom. They all have to join the real world eventually.
Is Song Reader a model that can guide your teaching? Not directly. But the novel way that this album has been conceptualized relates to some interesting ideas that relate to how many are re-thinking traditional approaches to teaching.
For more on Beck’s album, visit Song Reader.net. Some of my favorite interpretations of “Old Shanghai”, the single that was released before the rest of the album was available, are below. If you’ve played “Old Shanghai” or anything else from Song Reader, please post a link to your work in the comments.
I was first introduced to non-linear narratives through Quentin Tarintino’s 1994 cult hit movie Pulp Fiction. I was hooked. When I saw Christopher Nolan’s Memento in a small art theater in 2000, I had to return to watch it again a week later.
These two movies are among my all-time favorites, and I eagerly recommend them to anyone who hasn’t seen them, but I’m hesitant to recommend them to my students. Both are violent and Pulp Fiction, in particular, has some very mature themes. I certainly couldn’t use either one in a classroom, which is a shame because the non-linear storylines offer unique opportunities to use a variety of verb tenses to discuss the difference between the order in which the events occur chronologically and the order in which they are presented in the narrative. Trying to untangle these two timelines is a fun challenge even if English is your first language.
The non-linear narrative in music video above, Darling It’s True by Locksley, affords all of the same opportunities, but instead of a gruesome scene in which a gangster’s moll overdoses in a drug dealer’s livingroom, there is a catchy pop rock beat. Another advantage that a three-and-a-half-minute video has over a feature-length film is that it can be viewed and reviewed several times over a much shorter period of time, which is absolutely necessary if you’re going to wrap your head around the difference between the order in which the events occur and the order in which they are presented.
So, the next time your students are struggling to find an interesting application of the past perfect, have them watch this video and then ask them whether the lead singer had met his bandmate at the corner store before he visited him at the tailor’s. And if so, how many times? When the video was recorded, had he visited the store before he went to the tailor’s? If your students are focused on the task of untangling the timelines instead of worrying about which tense they are using (or which tense they will have been using) you’re doing something right.
Have you ever used non-linear narratives with your students? If so, leave a comment below and share your favorite examples.
Okay, I didn’t create my first app (yet) but I did come up with a way to repurpose an existing app for learning, a much more edupunk approach.
I came across an app called Music Quiz, which recreates a game that came standard on older iPods. Music Quiz plays part of a randomly selected song on your iPod and then asks you to identify the song title, album title or artist. You can set the difficulty (more difficult means more possibilities to choose from) and even choose a subset of songs to form the game (just songs from one album or artist, for example). While it’s fun to sit on the bus and see if I can identify the name of every Sloan song ever released, I also started thinking if this same game could be applied to learning English.
So I recorded some idioms as mp3 files using Audacity, a free audio recorder. The actual sound file is me reading the definition twice in twelve seconds (because Music Quiz can be set to play 12 seconds of each song). Within Audacity, I saved the idiom as the song title. The files are below, if you want to try it out:
A student can add these files to an iPod or iPhone and set Music Quiz to quiz them on these audio files. (From the menu, set Custom Quiz to on to choose specific files for the quiz.) As the recording plays, the student has to choose which idiom matches the definition she hears. I’ve chosen 20 heart-themed idioms, so I’ve used heart as the album title. Three levels of metadata are available within Music Quiz (artist > album > song title) though testing students in higher order information (i.e. whether a given idiom was a heart, food, or animal idiom) may not be worthwhile.
Alternatively, album could be defined as chapters in a vocabulary textbook. I’m not sure it would be much more helpful for students to quiz themselves on which chapter a given idiom was in, but it could be a good way to organize the audio files and make it easy to choose specific chapters for a quiz. Of course, if Music Quiz were used to review other structures (verb tenses, vocabulary, etc.) there might be better ways to take advantage of other levels of metadata.
Clearly an iPod is not going to replace traditional language instruction anytime soon. But, if students are always listening to their iDevices anyway, they might as well use them to practice English. A well-designed activity could really engage them in this kind of helpful practice. If you have ideas for other ways to use Music Quiz or other apps for English practice, leave a comment.
You didn't think your students were reading, did you?
As promised, the list of songs I used in my History of English Language Popular Music Elective (HELP-ME) class is below. The class was taught over 20 days in 5 weeks with each week devoted to a different decade of popular music. We covered one song per day usually beginning with watching a video of the song, examining the lyrics and something linguistically relevant (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.), talking about the meaning of the song, and then listening to the song again and singing along.
A much more exhaustive (and exhausting!) resource is available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet also contains several songs I considered but didn’t use. Each entry has the song title, the artist, the year it was released, the genre, information about it’s popularity (#1 for four weeks, for example) as well as links to the lyrics, video, and Wikipedia articles on both the song and the artist. I also have my notes on relevant or ESL-appropriate features of each song.
I delivered all of this information to students using Moodle, an open-source online course management system. I hoped to present as much information for students to explore as I could and several students took advantage of this opportunity by logging in and exploring many of these resources. They were also able to listen to each of the songs via our streaming server. (Simply giving them the .mp3 files would have created copyright issues.)
Overall, the class was very well received for it’s novel approach and interesting subject. I included a wide variety of musical genres so that no student would have to suffer through a prolonged period of country or R&B. Students also appreciated touching on grammar points and new vocabulary words in the more relaxed context of an elective class. They were exposed to more English without having to worry about a final exam.
If I were to teach the class again, I would probably eliminate a couple of the longer songs, or at least find a way to devote more time to them. The class really enjoyed Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) and Parents Just Don’t Understand, for example, but we had to rush through them a bit in order to completely cover the lyrics. In fact, I would like to teach this class every quarter, and could by changing up the songs so that they wouldn’t be repeated if students take the class in back-to-back quarters. The class included students from all five levels in our program and I worked hard to ensure that all students were able to gain something from the class. According to my student evaluations, I was successful.
In the table below, the names of the songs are linked to the lyrics (on sing365.com) and the artist names are linked to their page on Wikipedia. As I mentioned above, you can view more information at the Google Docs Spreadsheet.
Sing, floss, stretch. But trust me on the sunscreen.
I wrote recently about the elective class that I am developing and teaching on popular music. I’m covering a decade per week and a song per day. Within each song, I highlight an interesting grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation point.
Developing this class has meant combing through many online resources including lists of Billboard number one hit songs on Wikipedia and best-of-the-decade lists such as AOL’s radio blog, which is a good place to start because you can listen to most of the songs on the list. I’ve also found that the website sing365.com tends to have the least errors of all of the lyrics websites that are returned in Google searches.
I intend to post the list of songs I’ve used at the end of the quarter (I might even link to the Google Docs spreadsheet that I used to record all of the songs I considered for each decade) but for now I thought I would post the following music video, which I plan to use tomorrow, the last day before Thanksgiving break.
The song is actually a spoken word piece which has an interesting story. While not a traditional pop music video, I think the message is inspirational without being cheesy. Plus, there are lots and lots of examples of advice using the imperative. It might not get you through the last two weeks of the quarter, but it doesn’t hurt.
Next week I begin teaching a class that I designed called the History of English Language Popular Music Elective (HELP ME). It’s a five-week class that will feature a decade of popular music each week. The class meets every day and each day will feature a different song. We will listen to the song, review and analyze the lyrics, and then listen to the song again and sing along.
There are many goals for this class. First, it will expose students to songs that everybody knows to give them a foundation in popular cultural. When a song comes on the radio, I’d like students to be able to say, “Isn’t that the Beatles?” just like a native speaker might. The class will also include some linguistic content from each of the songs. It could be a specific verb tense, idioms, pronunciation or whatever, but this will be an English class. Finally, through the changing periods and genres of music, we’ll be able to talk about history. Many changes in our culture are reflected in popular music.
Here are a few songs that I’ve identified for inclusion in the class:
Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones – A Stones song has to be included, but many have very repetitive lyrics. Paint It Black has lots of English to work with including colorful metaphors that students could be asked to interpret. It could also be contrasted with What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, which also has colorful metaphors.
I have a few others, but that’s a start. Do you use music to teach ESL or EFL? What songs do you use? Share them in the comments below. I’d like to know. If there is enough interest, I’ll share my final set list once the class is finished.
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