lyrics
“Music takes hold of you on levels deeper than articulated meaning. That's why words, sustained by music, have such power. There is nothing like a song for expressing who we are” (Zengotita, 2006).
Lyrics - So What?
The ultimate integration of the parallel universes of music and language comes from when words are set to music in songs. Song activities offer many opportunities for students to learn English and to retain it.
Songs use repetition more than speech does (Margulis, 2013). A lot of teachers recognize the value of repetition in language learning. The value of repetitive song lyrics, however, can’t be overstated. Repetition makes lyrics predictable (Butzlaff, 2000). This improves comprehension, and reduces anxiety (Collins Block & Parris, 2008; Herrell & Jordan, 2008). Repetition helps students remember English - and their enjoyment of songs makes them want to remember it. A pedagogical benefit of song repetition that many teachers may not recognize arises from a phenomenon called “semantic saturation”.
As words are repeated again and again, their meaning can fade in our minds, so that we become aware of non-semantic patterns (Margulis, 2013; Patel, 2008). For example, in the minds of most listeners the image of a dog tends to fade from focus when listening to the audio below. The monotonous repetition causes minds to wander.
- Lyrics - so what?
- Lyrics, music and meaning
- Lyrics for teachers: Culture; mickey-mousing
Lyrics - So What?
The ultimate integration of the parallel universes of music and language comes from when words are set to music in songs. Song activities offer many opportunities for students to learn English and to retain it.
Songs use repetition more than speech does (Margulis, 2013). A lot of teachers recognize the value of repetition in language learning. The value of repetitive song lyrics, however, can’t be overstated. Repetition makes lyrics predictable (Butzlaff, 2000). This improves comprehension, and reduces anxiety (Collins Block & Parris, 2008; Herrell & Jordan, 2008). Repetition helps students remember English - and their enjoyment of songs makes them want to remember it. A pedagogical benefit of song repetition that many teachers may not recognize arises from a phenomenon called “semantic saturation”.
As words are repeated again and again, their meaning can fade in our minds, so that we become aware of non-semantic patterns (Margulis, 2013; Patel, 2008). For example, in the minds of most listeners the image of a dog tends to fade from focus when listening to the audio below. The monotonous repetition causes minds to wander.
Yet, one function of repetition is to signal "Pay attention; this is important" (Margulis, 2013). So as listeners become bored with an utterance, the utterance nonetheless continues to press itself upon them. Focus then often shifts to aspects of the utterance other than its meaning: the emotion of the speaker, his accent, the pauses and breaths between repetitions, how the words starts to sound like meaningless noise, how there is no reason to say these words over and over - anything related to the utterance or its speaking context might enter the mind.
This semantic saturation - the fading of meaning through repetition - generally goes in one of two directions: toward lower levels or higher levels. Lower levels are more concrete segments of the utterance. For example, attention might move from words to individual letter sounds, or from sentences down to stresses upon individual words. This downward movement is toward the more concrete and particular.
Movement toward higher levels means movement toward more abstract levels. For example, hearing "I love dogs. I love cats. I love birds," a listener likely notices the syntactic pattern "I love ..." The movement here is toward the more general.
Semantic saturation via the repetition in songs is therefore a good preparation for and segue into lessons on all kinds of language patterns, from the phonological to the syntactic, from the rhetorical to the organizational. By the time students have heard a stretch of lyrics several times, many will have noticed important language patterns without any prompting from the teacher. As Ebong and Sabbadini (2006) note, song lyrics introduce students to tricky language areas without their even noticing.
Teachers enhance the power inherent in repetition, however, by picking song lyrics which feature target language. Furthermore, sometimes the meanings of particular lyrics seem to fit particular instrumental music especially well. ESL teachers can exploit this congeniality to make learning vocabulary, grammar and culture more effective, efficient and enjoyable. By mickey-mousing the content of lyrics to the content and goals of the classroom, songs only gain in pedagogical value.
Lyrics, Music and Meaning
Musical melodies can be thought of as music's "syntax," or grammar (Patel, 2008). Syntax essentially means the structure of sentences: word order, and the way different kinds of words function in sentences. There appears to be significant overlap in the neural circuits which process musical and linguistic syntax. But there is nothing equivalent to words in instrumental music. So whatever similarities in mental processing there are between melodies in music and sentence structure in language, they have nothing to do with the meaning-units of sentences (Besson, et al, 1998; Patel, 2008).
Yet lyrics are remembered more easily when they are set to their original melody, and melodies are remembered more easily when paired with their original words (Patel, 2008; Poulin Charronat et al, 2005). Is this because certain linguistic meanings inherently “go with” the meaning of certain instrumental music?
On the surface, the idea that specific words are destined for specific melodies may strike some as ridiculous. After all, composers often pair upbeat rhythm and melodies with forlorn, hopeless lyrics, and vice versa. But there are several different senses in which specific melodies can “go with” specific lyrics.
First, the fact that established lyrics already have been set to specific scores gives the combination a power over listeners familiar with those songs (Patel, 2008; Woody, 2004). Specific music brings to mind specific words, and vice versa, because listeners have heard them in conjunction repeatedly - and because the tunes and phrases can be catchy.
Second, culture conditions musical responses (Patel, 2008). Every culture’s music contains at least some genres with characteristic patterns tied to that culture. Given that the familiarity of songs gives those songs a power over listeners, most members of a culture associate specific ideas with specific music.
For example, the consistent pairing throughout the famous American movie "Jaws" of the audio clip below with the appearance of a bloodthirsty shark, leads listeners familiar with the movie - even many who have only seen the trailers - to associate the music with that menacing shark (Williams; 1987; Woody, 2004). Furthermore, the tension and emotional cues of the music (discussed on the Pitch and Emotions pages) lend the music a growing feeling of apprehension. Thus, if asked to write lyrics for this music, it's likely that even people unfamiliar with the movie would write something fearful angry, or otherwise tense, and perhaps dangerous. But those who have seen the movie would be even more likely to write tense lyrics.
This semantic saturation - the fading of meaning through repetition - generally goes in one of two directions: toward lower levels or higher levels. Lower levels are more concrete segments of the utterance. For example, attention might move from words to individual letter sounds, or from sentences down to stresses upon individual words. This downward movement is toward the more concrete and particular.
Movement toward higher levels means movement toward more abstract levels. For example, hearing "I love dogs. I love cats. I love birds," a listener likely notices the syntactic pattern "I love ..." The movement here is toward the more general.
Semantic saturation via the repetition in songs is therefore a good preparation for and segue into lessons on all kinds of language patterns, from the phonological to the syntactic, from the rhetorical to the organizational. By the time students have heard a stretch of lyrics several times, many will have noticed important language patterns without any prompting from the teacher. As Ebong and Sabbadini (2006) note, song lyrics introduce students to tricky language areas without their even noticing.
Teachers enhance the power inherent in repetition, however, by picking song lyrics which feature target language. Furthermore, sometimes the meanings of particular lyrics seem to fit particular instrumental music especially well. ESL teachers can exploit this congeniality to make learning vocabulary, grammar and culture more effective, efficient and enjoyable. By mickey-mousing the content of lyrics to the content and goals of the classroom, songs only gain in pedagogical value.
Lyrics, Music and Meaning
Musical melodies can be thought of as music's "syntax," or grammar (Patel, 2008). Syntax essentially means the structure of sentences: word order, and the way different kinds of words function in sentences. There appears to be significant overlap in the neural circuits which process musical and linguistic syntax. But there is nothing equivalent to words in instrumental music. So whatever similarities in mental processing there are between melodies in music and sentence structure in language, they have nothing to do with the meaning-units of sentences (Besson, et al, 1998; Patel, 2008).
Yet lyrics are remembered more easily when they are set to their original melody, and melodies are remembered more easily when paired with their original words (Patel, 2008; Poulin Charronat et al, 2005). Is this because certain linguistic meanings inherently “go with” the meaning of certain instrumental music?
On the surface, the idea that specific words are destined for specific melodies may strike some as ridiculous. After all, composers often pair upbeat rhythm and melodies with forlorn, hopeless lyrics, and vice versa. But there are several different senses in which specific melodies can “go with” specific lyrics.
First, the fact that established lyrics already have been set to specific scores gives the combination a power over listeners familiar with those songs (Patel, 2008; Woody, 2004). Specific music brings to mind specific words, and vice versa, because listeners have heard them in conjunction repeatedly - and because the tunes and phrases can be catchy.
Second, culture conditions musical responses (Patel, 2008). Every culture’s music contains at least some genres with characteristic patterns tied to that culture. Given that the familiarity of songs gives those songs a power over listeners, most members of a culture associate specific ideas with specific music.
For example, the consistent pairing throughout the famous American movie "Jaws" of the audio clip below with the appearance of a bloodthirsty shark, leads listeners familiar with the movie - even many who have only seen the trailers - to associate the music with that menacing shark (Williams; 1987; Woody, 2004). Furthermore, the tension and emotional cues of the music (discussed on the Pitch and Emotions pages) lend the music a growing feeling of apprehension. Thus, if asked to write lyrics for this music, it's likely that even people unfamiliar with the movie would write something fearful angry, or otherwise tense, and perhaps dangerous. But those who have seen the movie would be even more likely to write tense lyrics.
Music-to-concept connections cross cultures too. Many listeners associate foreign music with specific referents. Of those Western subjects tested in one study, the majority associated Middle Eastern music with camels (Patel, 2008).
As the quote which opened this section indicates, many people’s identity derives partly from their musical tastes, and from the cultural connotations this "identity music" elicits in listeners (Pogaceanu, 2013; Woody, 2004). Both outsider and insider associations often overlap. In the U.S., for example, many people associate country music with cowboys, pickup trucks, broken hearts and traditional values. Some people embrace these associations, and others distance themselves from them.
Both the lyrics and the instrumentals in “identity music” usually have a signature sound. I can usually identify a new song as country music without anyone telling me that’s what it is. Not just the southern drawl of the singers, but also patterns in the melodies, timbre, overall topics and word choices help listeners pigeonhole genres like country music.
There also may be a "mysterious something" that links specific languages with specific music. There is some evidence that instrumental music specific to a region and era reflect formal linguistic patterns in the language of that region and era. This thesis was evaluated for European classical music of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, and a significant connection between musical characteristics and national language characteristics was found (Patel, 2008). The connection was strongest during periods of nationalism. This connection is also likely to exist between folk instrumentals and national languages. Though the connections are very ambiguous, and as yet research on this topic is scarce, if the thesis holds more generally it offers the potential to further harmonize musical and linguistic meanings.
Another way music can "go with" lyrics is when composers intentionally pair objective, physical characteristics of the music with the meaning of the words. This kind of music-to-lyrics matching is called “word painting.” It's an example of the more general category of “sound symbolism” I discussed on the Timbre page (Patel, 2008). Whether intentional or not, the Jewel excerpt below illustrates word painting (Jewel, 2001). Jewel sings the sentence, “Am I standing still” with the pitch level of her voice standing still.
As the quote which opened this section indicates, many people’s identity derives partly from their musical tastes, and from the cultural connotations this "identity music" elicits in listeners (Pogaceanu, 2013; Woody, 2004). Both outsider and insider associations often overlap. In the U.S., for example, many people associate country music with cowboys, pickup trucks, broken hearts and traditional values. Some people embrace these associations, and others distance themselves from them.
Both the lyrics and the instrumentals in “identity music” usually have a signature sound. I can usually identify a new song as country music without anyone telling me that’s what it is. Not just the southern drawl of the singers, but also patterns in the melodies, timbre, overall topics and word choices help listeners pigeonhole genres like country music.
There also may be a "mysterious something" that links specific languages with specific music. There is some evidence that instrumental music specific to a region and era reflect formal linguistic patterns in the language of that region and era. This thesis was evaluated for European classical music of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, and a significant connection between musical characteristics and national language characteristics was found (Patel, 2008). The connection was strongest during periods of nationalism. This connection is also likely to exist between folk instrumentals and national languages. Though the connections are very ambiguous, and as yet research on this topic is scarce, if the thesis holds more generally it offers the potential to further harmonize musical and linguistic meanings.
Another way music can "go with" lyrics is when composers intentionally pair objective, physical characteristics of the music with the meaning of the words. This kind of music-to-lyrics matching is called “word painting.” It's an example of the more general category of “sound symbolism” I discussed on the Timbre page (Patel, 2008). Whether intentional or not, the Jewel excerpt below illustrates word painting (Jewel, 2001). Jewel sings the sentence, “Am I standing still” with the pitch level of her voice standing still.
But the most important music-to-lyrics match is between lyrics and instrumental music having certain emotional cues, like those I discuss on the Emotions page. This kind of correspondence is what songwriters usually try to create when they write lyrics to accompany music, or vice versa.
Adele’s “Someone Like You” (2011), excerpted in the audio below, illustrates this. The relatively quick tempo and bright timbre of the introductory piano normally cues active emotions like happiness or pride, while the minor key of the melody can cue more passive emotions like sadness and regret. Interestingly, Adele's vocals switch from two or three words spoken fairly quickly together, to more drawn out words with longer pauses between them, adding to the ambiguity of the tempo. In addition, some of the notes and words have fast onsets, others slow. This mixed-cue music very aptly complements the overall theme of Adele’s bittersweet lyrics. As discussed on the Emotions page, mixed cues can also make music more meaningful to listeners - something Adele surely must have hoped for when writing the song.
Adele’s “Someone Like You” (2011), excerpted in the audio below, illustrates this. The relatively quick tempo and bright timbre of the introductory piano normally cues active emotions like happiness or pride, while the minor key of the melody can cue more passive emotions like sadness and regret. Interestingly, Adele's vocals switch from two or three words spoken fairly quickly together, to more drawn out words with longer pauses between them, adding to the ambiguity of the tempo. In addition, some of the notes and words have fast onsets, others slow. This mixed-cue music very aptly complements the overall theme of Adele’s bittersweet lyrics. As discussed on the Emotions page, mixed cues can also make music more meaningful to listeners - something Adele surely must have hoped for when writing the song.
In Summary: Music can "go with" lyrics emotionally, culturally, and personally. Hearing a song repeatedly leads listeners to associate the lyrics with the music. Some instrumentals may synchronize with the characteristics of specific languages. In addition, songwriters sometimes use sound symbolism, pairing physical characteristics of the music with the meaning of lyrics.
Lyrics for Teachers
Culture
Learning English is not simply a matter of mastering vocabulary and grammar. Languages are inseparable from culture (Peregroy & Boyle, 2008). Songs offer one avenue for introducing English learners to their host country’s culture. Through songs, students learn associations that native speakers make to specific music, and compare them with their own responses to the music.
One strategy for tying musical culture to language is for students to investigate, discuss and write about “extramusical” subjects (Murphey, 1996). These include biographical information about singers of songs they like, and the historical and cultural contexts in which the songs were written.
Students can compare the similarities and differences among the singers and musical contexts using Venn diagrams (Lems, 2005). To get this started, students brainstorm the names of artists and songs, which the teacher writes on the board. Then individual students categorize them according to any criteria they want (Murphey, 1992). Students later present their findings to class, accompanied by some of the actual songs (Flohr, 2006; Woody, 2004). After students are familiar with the singers, they role play talk-show interviews, and write press releases on behalf of the artists. (Murphey, 1992).
Murphey (ibid) also suggests using hit charts like the Billboard top 100 as reading materials. Students think critically about the reasons some songs are more popular than others, and justify their answers. For instance: Do radio stations play songs because songs are popular, or are songs popular because radio stations play them? What is the role of the music industry in all this? How do answers to these questions compare to the situation in the students' home countries?
Expressing Identity
Along with culture, personal identity is inextricably wrapped up in music. One way to use this fact in the classroom is by having students explain what a song means to them, and which parts they identify with (ibid). If the song is new to students, this activity should normally come only after all the other classroom exercises the song is being used for have been completed, to ensure that students fully understand the song and have heard it repeatedly. On the other hand, students can also write their interpretations of a song both before and after studying it in depth, to reflect on how their understanding of the song evolved, and on the strategies they used to understand it.
After using several songs in class, as review teachers record a few lines from each. Students then guess the titles, or else try to match the songs to printed copies of other lines from the song (ibid). Students then compare their answers, and respond to the prompt: Why did you remember those lines, but forgot others? What does this reveal about you? Or students explain why their classmates remembered some lines better than others.
Students also gain greatly from rewriting a song’s lyrics (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006). This may help students assimilate in unique ways to the host culture, by offering an opportunity to pick and choose from the personal and cultural themes of the original lyrics, those ideas they most want to accept or discard. As a quick and easy conclusion to a song lesson, I often ask students to imagine that they sang this song, and to write a short ending for it. They might change the song's message, or develop it, as they see fit. These activities help students take ownership of the songs. Students also explore what it means for music to fit words.
For the purposes of more focused musical underscoring - mickey mousing - teachers target lyric rewriting at specific language. For example, students change all present tense verbs to past, or change pronouns, to ensure they maintain subject-verb agreement. Or students change all words of a given category (adjectives, for example), so they produce sentences with opposite meanings (Murphey, 1992).
Yet more writing practice comes from students writing original lyrics to accompany unfamiliar instrumental music. This allows students to express their identity more creatively. Murphey (ibid) suggests collaborative songwriting as well. For instance, students each write down their favorite word, then pass the paper to their neighbors so classmates can write the next word in the song. I have done this by having each student write one complete sentence, then passing their songs (or stories, or dialogues) along.
To target song writing and rewriting so that the music underscores specific classroom goals, teachers assign a particular theme. In this case teachers should evaluate the fit of the music to the theme beforehand, especially using the criteria I discuss on the Emotions page. So for example if the goal were to have some fun and stimulate humor, a teacher might pick music that did not fit the theme.
For songwriters struggling to come up with words to fit the music, Middleton (2001) suggests writing “dummy lyrics.” These are whatever words come to mind that will rhyme and fit the melody and beat, even if they’re nonsense. “For example, if your phonetic lyric goes, "ee-no-wah," see what words contain those sounds — "we know why," "see no-one," etc. Later, you can see which of them are relevant to your song. You can also try near matches (‘in a while,’ ‘be my wife,’ etc.)”
For more focused targeting, teachers give students a list of words to use in their songs. Unless students are advanced and very imaginative, however, the list needs to be carefully thought through; rhyming words should be included, because students may not know enough words to generate them independently. And teachers usually want to ensure the words are somehow connected - for example thematically - so students can weave them into a coherent narrative more intuitively. If students are very low level, teachers may want to include on the lists not just targeted vocabulary - like nouns - but also verbs and other parts of speech, so students aren't overloaded by the demands of both generating and arranging the words. But to promote engagement and creativity, I always allow students to generate their own words to go with target words, if they want to and are able to.
Later, students read each other's lyrics, and vote on whose are the best, by assigning each a 1, 2, 3 ... (Murphey, 1992). Including as candidates "real" songs the class has studied may reveal that students have more talent than they realize.
Listening for vocabulary
People find pieces of their identity from a wide variety of different undercurrents in cultures. Pop songs can be especially useful in teaching students about subcultures and their idioms (Murphey, 1992; Miyake, n.d., Ulate, 2007; Lems, 2005). As Murphey (ibid) points out, musical subcultures have their own rituals, jargon and even "high priests."
One way to encourage students to listen actively for any new cultural idioms, or other vocabulary, is to have them keep a tally of how many times a word occurs when they listen to a song. They can also highlight occurrences of unfamiliar words on lyrics sheets. These techniques can target other language, like specific verb tenses, adjectives, or letter sounds (Okello, Jaquays & Tomas, 2013). Or, students can highlight errors (Ortega, 2001). The nice thing about these tactics is that highlighting and tallying don't take much time and attention away from listening to the song aesthetically, so students still enjoy the music.
Another way to stimulate active listening for vocabulary is with cloze, or gap-fill, activities. These are more involved than highlighting. Clozes are especially useful for fostering listening comprehension. To get additional benefit out of clozes, as well as to reduce during-song distractions, students try to fill in the blanks before listening to the song, then verify their answers while listening. By simply checking to see whether their guess is right or wrong, instead of taking time to fill in the blanks while listening, students have more time to enjoy the song, so it's not just a linguistic exercise. And by filling them in beforehand, students can practice using context clues.
Murphey (1996) suggests providing vocabulary that is missing from a song cloze to students before handing out the cloze worksheet. Students then imagine a story, description or situation using these words. After they listen to the song, they compare their lyrics to the "right" lyrics.
The Internet is rife with free printable cloze worksheets. Clozes seem to be the one-size-fits-all music activity. But I have been very dissatisfied with Internet clozes.
One problem with generic clozes is that they often don't target specific vocabulary, verb tenses, sounds, letters or other language patterns and categories. The other main problem is that the authors can create so many blanks for students to fill in that students don’t have time to even process the sounds and meanings, let alone write in or verify the words - even when I liberally use the pause button and play the song repeatedly. This takes the aesthetic experience, and thus the enjoyment, away from the song activity.
I now write almost all my own clozes. I replace words with blanks in at most every other line, but more often in every third, fourth or fifth line. I omit words for a reason. If we are studying adjectives, I omit adjectives; if I want students to improve listening comprehension of /p/ versus /b/ sounds, I omit words with those sounds, or omit just the letters.
Even when I am not targeting specific language patterns, the omissions are not arbitrary; in those cases I omit the vocabulary new to my students, those words I expect to cause them trouble. I always preteach this vocabulary, because students can't be expected to recognize these words if they've never heard them modeled before.
It is this kind of targeting of specific musically underscored language and learning goals that defines mickey-mousing in ESL.
One other thing I make sure to do to custom clozes is number each line, so as to orient students both during listening, and when going over the song as a class, or in groups.
When doing vocabulary work with clozes, or when using songs in other activities, many authors recommend allowing students to first hear a song without any analytic tasks to interfere with their natural responses to the music. One way to ensure this is by playing instrumental versions first. (Lems, 2001; Okello, Jaquays & Tomas, 2013; Pearman & Friedman, 2009; Woody, 2004).
Focusing on meaning
To more closely examine specific words and sentences, give students strips of paper with lines from the song. Either before or after a first listening, individuals or groups of students arrange the lines. Then they check their lyrics and correct them to fit the song as they listen to it. (Ulate, 2007). For a game quality, groups race to see who finishes first (Lems, 2005). As an alternative, each student can be given one line, and the groups work out the order of the lines collaboratively. Then each student sings his or her line at the proper time.
To extend this activity to raising cultural awareness, students justify their arrangements to partners in a group, then discuss possible cultural reasons their arrangements differed from the actual song lyrics.
This extension might work even better as a cultural consciousness raiser if the students were given separate words instead of lines (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006; Ortega, 2001). With individual words, the increased number of potential arrangements allows more room for creativity - and therefore more room for cultural and personal-identity peculiarities to show themselves.
All of these jumbled-lyrics exercises draw students' attention to the meaning of the words and sentences, and to meaning connections between words and sentences.
In Summary: Targeted work with the words of song lyric lyrics can focus on vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension, or culture and identity. Exploring extramusical subjects and idioms ties music and language to culture. Writing their own lyrics helps students express their identity and assimilate into the host country. Giving students lists of words to use in their songwriting targets specific vocabulary or grammatical categories. Highlighting target language and using targeted cloze exercises help students listen actively. Students should have opportunities to listen to songs naturally, not just as texts. They can more closely examine the meaning of individual lyrics by arranging and rearranging verses or individual words, and discussing the differences.
Mickey Mousing
The activities above, in which students arrange cut-out words into lyrics either before, during, or after listening, force the students to construct grammatically correct sentences. If the song repeats a certain grammatical pattern, this kind of activity works well when learning or practicing that pattern. And it's precisely songs with repeated target language that best enhance learning goals.
Lems (2005) recommends a series of grammar-building activities exploiting the repetition in the song “El Condor Pasa,” by Simon and Garfunkel (1999). The audio below contains an excerpt from the song.
Lyrics for Teachers
Culture
Learning English is not simply a matter of mastering vocabulary and grammar. Languages are inseparable from culture (Peregroy & Boyle, 2008). Songs offer one avenue for introducing English learners to their host country’s culture. Through songs, students learn associations that native speakers make to specific music, and compare them with their own responses to the music.
One strategy for tying musical culture to language is for students to investigate, discuss and write about “extramusical” subjects (Murphey, 1996). These include biographical information about singers of songs they like, and the historical and cultural contexts in which the songs were written.
Students can compare the similarities and differences among the singers and musical contexts using Venn diagrams (Lems, 2005). To get this started, students brainstorm the names of artists and songs, which the teacher writes on the board. Then individual students categorize them according to any criteria they want (Murphey, 1992). Students later present their findings to class, accompanied by some of the actual songs (Flohr, 2006; Woody, 2004). After students are familiar with the singers, they role play talk-show interviews, and write press releases on behalf of the artists. (Murphey, 1992).
Murphey (ibid) also suggests using hit charts like the Billboard top 100 as reading materials. Students think critically about the reasons some songs are more popular than others, and justify their answers. For instance: Do radio stations play songs because songs are popular, or are songs popular because radio stations play them? What is the role of the music industry in all this? How do answers to these questions compare to the situation in the students' home countries?
Expressing Identity
Along with culture, personal identity is inextricably wrapped up in music. One way to use this fact in the classroom is by having students explain what a song means to them, and which parts they identify with (ibid). If the song is new to students, this activity should normally come only after all the other classroom exercises the song is being used for have been completed, to ensure that students fully understand the song and have heard it repeatedly. On the other hand, students can also write their interpretations of a song both before and after studying it in depth, to reflect on how their understanding of the song evolved, and on the strategies they used to understand it.
After using several songs in class, as review teachers record a few lines from each. Students then guess the titles, or else try to match the songs to printed copies of other lines from the song (ibid). Students then compare their answers, and respond to the prompt: Why did you remember those lines, but forgot others? What does this reveal about you? Or students explain why their classmates remembered some lines better than others.
Students also gain greatly from rewriting a song’s lyrics (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006). This may help students assimilate in unique ways to the host culture, by offering an opportunity to pick and choose from the personal and cultural themes of the original lyrics, those ideas they most want to accept or discard. As a quick and easy conclusion to a song lesson, I often ask students to imagine that they sang this song, and to write a short ending for it. They might change the song's message, or develop it, as they see fit. These activities help students take ownership of the songs. Students also explore what it means for music to fit words.
For the purposes of more focused musical underscoring - mickey mousing - teachers target lyric rewriting at specific language. For example, students change all present tense verbs to past, or change pronouns, to ensure they maintain subject-verb agreement. Or students change all words of a given category (adjectives, for example), so they produce sentences with opposite meanings (Murphey, 1992).
Yet more writing practice comes from students writing original lyrics to accompany unfamiliar instrumental music. This allows students to express their identity more creatively. Murphey (ibid) suggests collaborative songwriting as well. For instance, students each write down their favorite word, then pass the paper to their neighbors so classmates can write the next word in the song. I have done this by having each student write one complete sentence, then passing their songs (or stories, or dialogues) along.
To target song writing and rewriting so that the music underscores specific classroom goals, teachers assign a particular theme. In this case teachers should evaluate the fit of the music to the theme beforehand, especially using the criteria I discuss on the Emotions page. So for example if the goal were to have some fun and stimulate humor, a teacher might pick music that did not fit the theme.
For songwriters struggling to come up with words to fit the music, Middleton (2001) suggests writing “dummy lyrics.” These are whatever words come to mind that will rhyme and fit the melody and beat, even if they’re nonsense. “For example, if your phonetic lyric goes, "ee-no-wah," see what words contain those sounds — "we know why," "see no-one," etc. Later, you can see which of them are relevant to your song. You can also try near matches (‘in a while,’ ‘be my wife,’ etc.)”
For more focused targeting, teachers give students a list of words to use in their songs. Unless students are advanced and very imaginative, however, the list needs to be carefully thought through; rhyming words should be included, because students may not know enough words to generate them independently. And teachers usually want to ensure the words are somehow connected - for example thematically - so students can weave them into a coherent narrative more intuitively. If students are very low level, teachers may want to include on the lists not just targeted vocabulary - like nouns - but also verbs and other parts of speech, so students aren't overloaded by the demands of both generating and arranging the words. But to promote engagement and creativity, I always allow students to generate their own words to go with target words, if they want to and are able to.
Later, students read each other's lyrics, and vote on whose are the best, by assigning each a 1, 2, 3 ... (Murphey, 1992). Including as candidates "real" songs the class has studied may reveal that students have more talent than they realize.
Listening for vocabulary
People find pieces of their identity from a wide variety of different undercurrents in cultures. Pop songs can be especially useful in teaching students about subcultures and their idioms (Murphey, 1992; Miyake, n.d., Ulate, 2007; Lems, 2005). As Murphey (ibid) points out, musical subcultures have their own rituals, jargon and even "high priests."
One way to encourage students to listen actively for any new cultural idioms, or other vocabulary, is to have them keep a tally of how many times a word occurs when they listen to a song. They can also highlight occurrences of unfamiliar words on lyrics sheets. These techniques can target other language, like specific verb tenses, adjectives, or letter sounds (Okello, Jaquays & Tomas, 2013). Or, students can highlight errors (Ortega, 2001). The nice thing about these tactics is that highlighting and tallying don't take much time and attention away from listening to the song aesthetically, so students still enjoy the music.
Another way to stimulate active listening for vocabulary is with cloze, or gap-fill, activities. These are more involved than highlighting. Clozes are especially useful for fostering listening comprehension. To get additional benefit out of clozes, as well as to reduce during-song distractions, students try to fill in the blanks before listening to the song, then verify their answers while listening. By simply checking to see whether their guess is right or wrong, instead of taking time to fill in the blanks while listening, students have more time to enjoy the song, so it's not just a linguistic exercise. And by filling them in beforehand, students can practice using context clues.
Murphey (1996) suggests providing vocabulary that is missing from a song cloze to students before handing out the cloze worksheet. Students then imagine a story, description or situation using these words. After they listen to the song, they compare their lyrics to the "right" lyrics.
The Internet is rife with free printable cloze worksheets. Clozes seem to be the one-size-fits-all music activity. But I have been very dissatisfied with Internet clozes.
One problem with generic clozes is that they often don't target specific vocabulary, verb tenses, sounds, letters or other language patterns and categories. The other main problem is that the authors can create so many blanks for students to fill in that students don’t have time to even process the sounds and meanings, let alone write in or verify the words - even when I liberally use the pause button and play the song repeatedly. This takes the aesthetic experience, and thus the enjoyment, away from the song activity.
I now write almost all my own clozes. I replace words with blanks in at most every other line, but more often in every third, fourth or fifth line. I omit words for a reason. If we are studying adjectives, I omit adjectives; if I want students to improve listening comprehension of /p/ versus /b/ sounds, I omit words with those sounds, or omit just the letters.
Even when I am not targeting specific language patterns, the omissions are not arbitrary; in those cases I omit the vocabulary new to my students, those words I expect to cause them trouble. I always preteach this vocabulary, because students can't be expected to recognize these words if they've never heard them modeled before.
It is this kind of targeting of specific musically underscored language and learning goals that defines mickey-mousing in ESL.
One other thing I make sure to do to custom clozes is number each line, so as to orient students both during listening, and when going over the song as a class, or in groups.
When doing vocabulary work with clozes, or when using songs in other activities, many authors recommend allowing students to first hear a song without any analytic tasks to interfere with their natural responses to the music. One way to ensure this is by playing instrumental versions first. (Lems, 2001; Okello, Jaquays & Tomas, 2013; Pearman & Friedman, 2009; Woody, 2004).
Focusing on meaning
To more closely examine specific words and sentences, give students strips of paper with lines from the song. Either before or after a first listening, individuals or groups of students arrange the lines. Then they check their lyrics and correct them to fit the song as they listen to it. (Ulate, 2007). For a game quality, groups race to see who finishes first (Lems, 2005). As an alternative, each student can be given one line, and the groups work out the order of the lines collaboratively. Then each student sings his or her line at the proper time.
To extend this activity to raising cultural awareness, students justify their arrangements to partners in a group, then discuss possible cultural reasons their arrangements differed from the actual song lyrics.
This extension might work even better as a cultural consciousness raiser if the students were given separate words instead of lines (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006; Ortega, 2001). With individual words, the increased number of potential arrangements allows more room for creativity - and therefore more room for cultural and personal-identity peculiarities to show themselves.
All of these jumbled-lyrics exercises draw students' attention to the meaning of the words and sentences, and to meaning connections between words and sentences.
In Summary: Targeted work with the words of song lyric lyrics can focus on vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension, or culture and identity. Exploring extramusical subjects and idioms ties music and language to culture. Writing their own lyrics helps students express their identity and assimilate into the host country. Giving students lists of words to use in their songwriting targets specific vocabulary or grammatical categories. Highlighting target language and using targeted cloze exercises help students listen actively. Students should have opportunities to listen to songs naturally, not just as texts. They can more closely examine the meaning of individual lyrics by arranging and rearranging verses or individual words, and discussing the differences.
Mickey Mousing
The activities above, in which students arrange cut-out words into lyrics either before, during, or after listening, force the students to construct grammatically correct sentences. If the song repeats a certain grammatical pattern, this kind of activity works well when learning or practicing that pattern. And it's precisely songs with repeated target language that best enhance learning goals.
Lems (2005) recommends a series of grammar-building activities exploiting the repetition in the song “El Condor Pasa,” by Simon and Garfunkel (1999). The audio below contains an excerpt from the song.
In these activities students first listen to the song. Then they brainstorm words to fill in the blanks in the line “I’d rather be a ... than a ...” That involves students using nouns. Then, teachers remove the word “a," so that students are writing (or speaking) “I’d rather be ... than ...” That modification forces students to use adjectives, and/or nouns with determiners. As a further alternative, teachers remove “be," forcing students to use verbs in the construction "I'd rather ... than ..." Teachers could also remove "I'd," forcing students to use pronouns or proper names in constructions like "He/she/it/Martha would rather ... than ..."
Activities like this help transition students from structured practice to more free-form activities like writing their own original lyrics.
I've found that song activities should not be one-off affairs; my students have gained little from single songs used for a single purpose. I've had the best luck using a single song in several activities over time. I also use the same song to illustrate different language features. This amplifies the repetition, while giving students something else to do with each listening, so they don't get bored. Especially if they like the song, this approach ensures that they will learn a lot of material, and the material will stick. It also reduces preparation time for teachers. As I experiment with songs in class, I often rewrite the next day's lesson to do further work with a song students are particularly enjoying.
For example, "El Condor Pasa" illustrates lyrics fitting music from another angle. The pitch at which the word "snail" is sung rises markedly from the preceding pitch. Thus it provides synchronized underscoring for the intonation contour illustrated in the audio below.
Activities like this help transition students from structured practice to more free-form activities like writing their own original lyrics.
I've found that song activities should not be one-off affairs; my students have gained little from single songs used for a single purpose. I've had the best luck using a single song in several activities over time. I also use the same song to illustrate different language features. This amplifies the repetition, while giving students something else to do with each listening, so they don't get bored. Especially if they like the song, this approach ensures that they will learn a lot of material, and the material will stick. It also reduces preparation time for teachers. As I experiment with songs in class, I often rewrite the next day's lesson to do further work with a song students are particularly enjoying.
For example, "El Condor Pasa" illustrates lyrics fitting music from another angle. The pitch at which the word "snail" is sung rises markedly from the preceding pitch. Thus it provides synchronized underscoring for the intonation contour illustrated in the audio below.
So as a follow up to the grammar exercises above, students could practice saying their own sentences to each other with this intonation, and also discuss situations in which this intonation would be appropriate.
The scope of follow-up activities with songs is limitless, because lyrics constitute a text in their own right. Virtually anything students can do with the written word, or with a video, picture or recording, they can do with songs (Murphey, 1992).
This means teachers can assign writing tasks appropriate to any other written text: papers which review, critique or otherwise aesthetically respond to the lyrics; summaries; compare-and-contrast assignments; and assignments using the lyrics or extramusical information as evidence in an academic thesis paper.
Lyrics also lend themselves just as much as any other text to teaching the full gamut of reading strategies. The reading strategies of proficient readers include prediction, sounding out words, visualization, rereading and reading ahead, rehearsal/summarizing, and collaborative negotiation of meaning. (Collins Block and Parris, 2008).
Different degrees of synchronized underscoring
Songs are especially good texts for students to retell from memory, as an assessment of listening and reading comprehension. They are so good because students can read them or hear them with varying degrees of synchronized underscoring (support): A video form of the song with subtitles gives the most support; the audio together with written lyrics, or a music video which has action but no subtitles, gives intermediate support; the music together with sung lyrics offers yet less support; while a written copy of the lyrics, an instrumental recording, or a muted video forces students to recall and retell without support.
This variety in the levels of synchronized underscoring possible in combinations of instrumentals, lyrics, subtitles and videos also makes music videos very useful for targeting all the verb tenses. All verb conjugations are some form of past, present or future (Folse, 2009). Retelling lends itself to the simple past. Students could also retell in the present perfect, in response to the prompt: "What have you seen?" Or in the past progressive: "What was happening when ... ?" (Murphey, 1992).
By tailoring before- during- and after-viewing, reading, or listening questions, teachers target the other tenses. So to practice the various future tenses, before the video teachers ask questions in the simple future: "What do you think you will see?" Or in future perfect: "What will have happened if/when ....?" Students base predictions on the instrumental music they've heard previously, or on written copies of the lyrics. Alternately, teachers stop the music or music video part way through, and students predict what the next lines in the lyrics will be, in a game Okello, Jaquays and Tomas, (2013) call "Guess the Lyrics."
To practice simple present, teachers pause the music or video part way through, so students answer "What do you see/hear?" For present continuous, the question would be "What is happening?" (Murphey, 1992).
Teachers target all the other tenses by customizing questions in an analogous way.
For any of these tenses, teachers target specific vocabulary, and provide what might be called "conceptual underscoring" for learners, by asking more specific questions. So to use the video as underscoring for nouns, a teacher might prompt: "Was there a dog in the video?" Or for adjectives: "Was the dog black?" Or for verbs: "Was the dog barking?" And by asking about things, qualities or actions that both were and were not in the music/text/video (or are not, or will not be), teachers target both affirmative and negative forms of the verb tenses (ibid).
Students can also circle the words on a list they will hear, are hearing, or have heard. For less support, students write their own lists of words before, during or after listening.
Students can complete comparable exercises with categories of words, like adverbs, or with target sounds. Murphey (1992) suggests that students dictate what they hear to partners. This works with individual vocabulary, but Murphey suggests this activity in the context of students trying to recall as much of the lyrics as possible. Both approaches improve students' ability to recall information.
Dictation or reporting activities work well with other kinds of cooperative learning. Students who can't see the video ask questions of partners who can (ibid). The questioners then draw a picture based on the description, and compare it to the actual video.
Or half the class tries to guess what is happening by watching the faces of the other half, who are watching the video (ibid). Teachers provide differing levels of synchronized underscoring for the guessers by turning the sound on or off, by using music videos with or without lyrics, or by allowing those who can see the video to pantomime what they are seeing.
Bringing it all together
The synchronized underscoring, or mickey-mousing, which I advocate throughout this website fundamentally revolves around integration. The power of both music and language are enhanced when they dovetail neatly. This mickey-mousing won't be fully realized, however, until students themselves notice the kinds of instrumentals-to-lyrics parallels I have been discussing. When they do, it will improve their ability to understand and regulate their own learning.
Music education and language education mutually reinforce each other. Learning to look for connections between the two - even very tenuous metaphorical connections - leads to deeper and broader ideas in both realms, as well as fostering learning strategies that cross into other disciplines (Butzlaff, 2000; Kang & Williamson, 2014; Lems, 2005; Pearman & Friedman, 2009; Speh & Ahramjian, 2009; Terrell, 2012).
Interdisciplinary thinking is a mindset, and one that improves learning.
Interdisciplinary thinking should not stop with music-to-language parallels. Either in readings, exercises, discussions or student compositions, students learn interdisciplinary outlooks by doing their own mickey-mousing in the broadest sense. Multimedia readings and projects, such as visual media accompanied by music, offer a rich source of materials for this kind of interdisciplinary study. Objects mentioned in songs that students can touch and manipulate offer another source of material.
Teachers should look for integration of the whole person and the whole range of academic subject areas in language learning. This means an examination of friendship implications of lyrics (and how they are either complemented or contradicted by the instrumentals), counting beats and groupings of beats to practice math vocabulary, checking how well visuals fit music, tying music and art to the community and its politics, incorporating physical movements, and even integrating spiritual and religious subjects when appropriate. People learn and retain not so much isolated facts, as connections among facts (Ormrod, 2011).
For example, Murphey (1992) recommends comparing the universal themes in songs to the same themes in literature. Thus students compare themes of materialism in "Material Girl" by Madonna (2013) with the same themes in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this way the video provides a more abstract kind of synchronized underscoring for the book. The video below contains the official music video of "Material Girl."
The scope of follow-up activities with songs is limitless, because lyrics constitute a text in their own right. Virtually anything students can do with the written word, or with a video, picture or recording, they can do with songs (Murphey, 1992).
This means teachers can assign writing tasks appropriate to any other written text: papers which review, critique or otherwise aesthetically respond to the lyrics; summaries; compare-and-contrast assignments; and assignments using the lyrics or extramusical information as evidence in an academic thesis paper.
Lyrics also lend themselves just as much as any other text to teaching the full gamut of reading strategies. The reading strategies of proficient readers include prediction, sounding out words, visualization, rereading and reading ahead, rehearsal/summarizing, and collaborative negotiation of meaning. (Collins Block and Parris, 2008).
Different degrees of synchronized underscoring
Songs are especially good texts for students to retell from memory, as an assessment of listening and reading comprehension. They are so good because students can read them or hear them with varying degrees of synchronized underscoring (support): A video form of the song with subtitles gives the most support; the audio together with written lyrics, or a music video which has action but no subtitles, gives intermediate support; the music together with sung lyrics offers yet less support; while a written copy of the lyrics, an instrumental recording, or a muted video forces students to recall and retell without support.
This variety in the levels of synchronized underscoring possible in combinations of instrumentals, lyrics, subtitles and videos also makes music videos very useful for targeting all the verb tenses. All verb conjugations are some form of past, present or future (Folse, 2009). Retelling lends itself to the simple past. Students could also retell in the present perfect, in response to the prompt: "What have you seen?" Or in the past progressive: "What was happening when ... ?" (Murphey, 1992).
By tailoring before- during- and after-viewing, reading, or listening questions, teachers target the other tenses. So to practice the various future tenses, before the video teachers ask questions in the simple future: "What do you think you will see?" Or in future perfect: "What will have happened if/when ....?" Students base predictions on the instrumental music they've heard previously, or on written copies of the lyrics. Alternately, teachers stop the music or music video part way through, and students predict what the next lines in the lyrics will be, in a game Okello, Jaquays and Tomas, (2013) call "Guess the Lyrics."
To practice simple present, teachers pause the music or video part way through, so students answer "What do you see/hear?" For present continuous, the question would be "What is happening?" (Murphey, 1992).
Teachers target all the other tenses by customizing questions in an analogous way.
For any of these tenses, teachers target specific vocabulary, and provide what might be called "conceptual underscoring" for learners, by asking more specific questions. So to use the video as underscoring for nouns, a teacher might prompt: "Was there a dog in the video?" Or for adjectives: "Was the dog black?" Or for verbs: "Was the dog barking?" And by asking about things, qualities or actions that both were and were not in the music/text/video (or are not, or will not be), teachers target both affirmative and negative forms of the verb tenses (ibid).
Students can also circle the words on a list they will hear, are hearing, or have heard. For less support, students write their own lists of words before, during or after listening.
Students can complete comparable exercises with categories of words, like adverbs, or with target sounds. Murphey (1992) suggests that students dictate what they hear to partners. This works with individual vocabulary, but Murphey suggests this activity in the context of students trying to recall as much of the lyrics as possible. Both approaches improve students' ability to recall information.
Dictation or reporting activities work well with other kinds of cooperative learning. Students who can't see the video ask questions of partners who can (ibid). The questioners then draw a picture based on the description, and compare it to the actual video.
Or half the class tries to guess what is happening by watching the faces of the other half, who are watching the video (ibid). Teachers provide differing levels of synchronized underscoring for the guessers by turning the sound on or off, by using music videos with or without lyrics, or by allowing those who can see the video to pantomime what they are seeing.
Bringing it all together
The synchronized underscoring, or mickey-mousing, which I advocate throughout this website fundamentally revolves around integration. The power of both music and language are enhanced when they dovetail neatly. This mickey-mousing won't be fully realized, however, until students themselves notice the kinds of instrumentals-to-lyrics parallels I have been discussing. When they do, it will improve their ability to understand and regulate their own learning.
Music education and language education mutually reinforce each other. Learning to look for connections between the two - even very tenuous metaphorical connections - leads to deeper and broader ideas in both realms, as well as fostering learning strategies that cross into other disciplines (Butzlaff, 2000; Kang & Williamson, 2014; Lems, 2005; Pearman & Friedman, 2009; Speh & Ahramjian, 2009; Terrell, 2012).
Interdisciplinary thinking is a mindset, and one that improves learning.
Interdisciplinary thinking should not stop with music-to-language parallels. Either in readings, exercises, discussions or student compositions, students learn interdisciplinary outlooks by doing their own mickey-mousing in the broadest sense. Multimedia readings and projects, such as visual media accompanied by music, offer a rich source of materials for this kind of interdisciplinary study. Objects mentioned in songs that students can touch and manipulate offer another source of material.
Teachers should look for integration of the whole person and the whole range of academic subject areas in language learning. This means an examination of friendship implications of lyrics (and how they are either complemented or contradicted by the instrumentals), counting beats and groupings of beats to practice math vocabulary, checking how well visuals fit music, tying music and art to the community and its politics, incorporating physical movements, and even integrating spiritual and religious subjects when appropriate. People learn and retain not so much isolated facts, as connections among facts (Ormrod, 2011).
For example, Murphey (1992) recommends comparing the universal themes in songs to the same themes in literature. Thus students compare themes of materialism in "Material Girl" by Madonna (2013) with the same themes in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this way the video provides a more abstract kind of synchronized underscoring for the book. The video below contains the official music video of "Material Girl."
One way for students to get in the habit of interdisciplinary thinking, as well as improving their music and language awareness and performance, is by keeping interdisciplinary “academic notebooks” (Pearman & Friedman, 2009). These notebooks diverge from journals in that they are not primarily aimed at practicing writing skills and strategies. Rather, they are records of “learning as it occurs,” a place where students write down their thoughts on the connections between music, language, and other subjects.
To use the notebooks, teachers ask open-ended discussion questions. These stimulate students to reflect on the ideas of classmates, then write their own responses in the notebooks (ibid). Questions could be very general ("What did you see and hear in the video?") But questions only achieve their full mickey-mousing potential when they target some idea ("What do the book and the video say about the benefits and drawbacks of materialism? How do you know they are saying this?")
Primarily, these notebooks are created and managed by students. Pearman and Friedman (2009) advise teachers to approach notebook organization in a flexible way, and not to be afraid of jumping around to different sections of the notebook during a given lesson. They had their music students create sections on “reading, listening and watching.” They pointed out that a visual category gave room for imaginative visualization as well as the things students literally see, like album covers and video action. Imaginative visualization helps both reading and music comprehension (ibid).
These notebooks mickey-mouse print to other modalities. That is, by writing down their own thoughts on connections, students use print to underscore music, speech, video, touch, ideas, subject areas, and anything else they can perceive or conceive. Following Pearman and Friedman's advice to let students take the lead in maintaining the notebooks personalizes the learning, even while synchronizing it to wider universal themes.
Owning the music
Whatever else students do with music, the full power of song lyrics won’t be harnessed unless students sing along (Speh & Ahramjian, 2009). I don't think students should be forced to sing along. As Lems (2005) points out, even those who don’t sing can still read along on lyrics sheets, and hear the words. Those ashamed of their voices can still participate in lip-sync contests. Singing together as a class, however, can take some of the performance anxiety off of individual students.
Teachers encourage their students to sing along by singing themselves. I’m not a very good singer, nor am I a showman, but I try to keep in mind that my students care as little about the quality of my singing as I care about the quality of theirs. My body movements and off-key wailing may amuse students at times, but they demonstrate the kind of whole-person integration with music I am encouraging.
“Earworm” infections, those songs you just can’t get out of your head, are in themselves valuable to English learners as an aid to memory. But in language learning and in literacy, production is as important as reception to comprehension and language mastery (Collins Block & Parris, 2008; Lightbown & Spada, 2006).
Thus the main reason I use music in my classroom is to infect students with what might be called “voiceworms:” songs containing English vocabulary, common sayings, and linguistic patterns they will use again and again.
Viewed from a mickey-mousing perspective, the "voice" part of a voiceworm represents students internalizing language they learn. The "worm" represents the music on the outside, whose rhythmic and melodic undulation is a tool teachers use in presenting language to students.
The worm does its job most effectively when it undulates in time with the vibrations of students' vocal cords, thereby both energizing and underscoring them. That's mickey-mousing.
In summary: Teachers can target any grammatical pattern, depending on the words they omit from a repetitive song verse, and the questions they ask of students. The same song should be used for different purposes, in order to maximize repetition without boring students. Pretty much anything students can do with any other text in any other modality can be done with songs. Songs and music videos are especially good texts for students to retell, because in different forms the music and video provide different degrees of underscoring (support). To fully realize the potential of mickey-mousing, teachers should provide opportunities for students to reflect on the connections between different modalities and disciplines; this can be facilitated with "academic notebooks." Finally, singing along with songs harnesses the music's full pedagogical power.