Music is unique. It demands focus, vision and critical thinking while promoting creativity. Music is not just an art. It’s an idea. When you hear a melody, it moves you. It makes you feel emotions. It is always there for you. It can comfort you when you are sad and entertain you when you are happy. The music doesn’t need anything outside of itself to be understood. Books require reading and understanding, films need watching and understanding, but with music you just need to listen. Regardless of age, music is one of life’s great pleasures. It can keep people interested and motivated.
Jeremy Harmer in the book “How to teach English” emphasizes the importance of music as a learning tool saying that music “speaks directly to our emotions while still allowing us to use our brains to analyse it and its effects if we so wish”. “Music can amuse and entertain, and it can make satisfactory connection between the world of leisure and the world of learning in the classroom.”(Harmer, 2007:19)
It is no wonder that teachers have included music in their classes. At first, music was regarded as a ‘filler’ activity, it was considered a reward. In time, however, teachers have begun including songs on a regular bases. They selected songs that specifically focus on a grammatical item, for example. “Songs can be used in many of the same ways that you might use an ordinary speech recording. Interesting lyrics and clarity of vocals help to make a song into appropriate classroom material, and for this reason folk music or a solo singer-songwriter are often a better bet than a heavy-metal band.”(Scrivener, 2006:338)
There are a lot of advantages of using songs in your class: songs contain authentic, natural language, they are generally short, they can be a good source of new vocabulary, they can be selected in such a way that it suits the students’ needs, they present the world around us, and, let’s not forget, they are so much fun.
