Music is Powerful: the benefits of songs in the motivation and the acquisition of English vocabulary in Spanish EFL students

Abstract

[eng] Human beings are intrinsically social creatures. They live in societies and share a common culture, a set of values, ideas and customs that identify them and distinguish them from the rest. Individuals communicate with each other through languages. Due to this, learning languages is essential in order to facilitate interaction with other humans. As a result of globalisation, English has arisen as a lingua franca. It is the predominant language used by citizens from different countries to communicate with other citizens from all over the world. In the Spanish educational system, English is a taught as a compulsory subject in secondary education, but the integration of authentic realia such as activities based on songs is not being fostered in the EFL classroom. Some EFL classrooms are becoming monotonous and repetitive in Spain, because teachers do not implement different types of exercises as academic strategies to engage students and facilitate their learning process, such as the inclusion of activities based on songs. Music is an essential cultural element since ancient times, and it is related to emotions. Through music, humans can interact and express themselves, such as it occurs with language. Music offers multiple advantages for the learning process. This paper focuses on the inclusion and use of activities based on songs in the Spanish EFL classroom to promote students’ motivation to learn English and their assimilation of vocabulary in this language. It presents a didactic proposal which will include exercises based on a song in English to engage learners and improve their English vocabulary. This teaching proposal will be based on a previous questionnaire, which will be designed to know about students’ opinions about the English subject and music. Finally, this teaching proposal will be put into practice to demonstrate that using songs in the EFL classroom is an advantageous pedagogical tool.