Music as Culture - Or, how to get students running to your classroom!

When I first started using comprehensible input several years ago, I noticed immediately that my students enjoyed Spanish more and were happier as they entered my classroom. Around the same time, I began incorporating music as a break between lessons or units, a hook to a unit or book chapter, a special treat, and of course, March Music Madness. Each year, I have been more purposeful in how music is used in my classroom and have noticed that as a result, students are not just happy to enter my room but also engaging with our content outside of the classroom!

When I began teaching Spanish through cultural content and novels, I started getting amazing comments from students like, “Señora, I love that we don’t just learn about Spanish, but that we learn interesting stuff from around the world!”

Culture is more than just types of music, food, holidays, and clothing that a people in a region use or participate in. It is geography, climate, demographics, religion, beliefs, perceptions, values, natural resources, and more! Culture is the 5th skill in the World Language Classroom because it emphasizes the learner’s ability to perceive, understand, and ultimately accept cultural relativity. When you use the second (or third or fourth!) language to teach about interesting people from around the world you are also teaching students that we are essentially all the same – DIFFERENT but SAME. Here in the Midwest, that is a very important lesson to teach. The more we are able to compare our culture to someone else’s, the more we realize that ALL humans want love, respect, and basic human rights.

How I use music to teach culture:

I start with a Movie Talk using screenshots of a music video that has a meaningful message (many have begun using the name Clip Chat to describe this because Movie Talk in its purest form doesn’t use screenshots but rather pausing / playing / describing).

1) Take a variety of screenshots that will be used to ‘tell the story’ of the video.

2) Decide on the vocabulary structures that you want to target in the lesson (if you are a non-targeted teacher simply skip this step!)

3. Toss the screenshots into Powerpoint or Slides. I prefer Powerpoint because you can do so much more with it. Then, I upload to Slides so I can access anywhere. (I understand this is a little extra work, but well worth it to me!)

4. Research the artist or band and include info in the Powerpoint presentation.

5. Research the country or region the artist or band is from and include demographics, climate, natural resources, politics, values, geography, and more. The more we know about a region, the more comparisons we can make to our own area. My students are particularly interested in agriculture because we are located in the corn belt and have many ties to farming.

6. If you are using the Powerpoint presentation to pre-teach vocabulary, create a cloze activity of the song that asks students to listen for that specific vocabulary.

7. Play around with the chorus: put lyrics in order, match meanings, make predictions, play along with instruments, dance, pass out phrases and have students lift the phrase in the air when they hear it…

8. Tie it all together with an embedded reading. You might even BEGIN your lesson or unit with the most basic form of the reading and then end with the more advanced form.

9. DO SOMETHING with this new knowledge. For lower levels, this may be a simple Timed Write. Intermediate levels may take the vocabulary acquired and put it into a new form with a writing prompt or picture prompt. Upper levels can compare and reflect. All levels can complete Venn Diagrams to help process and focus their learning. (Click here to read about how I use Hula Hoop Venn Diagrams in class).

What’s the end result?

YOUR CLASS ISN’T BORING. Students are excited to come to your class because you are making it compelling. And they come to class telling you that they added the song to their playlist or played it at a party over the weekend – connecting to your classroom content voluntarily outside the classroom!

For more ideas on how I incorporate music into my classroom, click here and here.