Uso de música para o ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira em um ambiente baseado em corpus

Abstract

Popular music has been used as a tool in the teaching of foreign language for a long time (Bertóli-Dutra, 2014), but music is usually seen as an extra material to be applied when the teacher has some free time during the class or as an extracurricular activity. However, in the research reported here, we argue instead that popular music can be the central element in language teaching; indeed, in our proposal, all language teaching activities were based on popular music and on texts that draw on topics related to popular music. At the same time, our goal was not to teach “pop song” English, but current spoken English. To meet this goal, the analysis of the song lyrics was used as a starting point for the materials. The main corpus used in the project was a pop song lyrics corpus (CoEL), composed of around 150,000 words from 585 British and American lyrics from pop songs performed by the following artists: Beatles, Bon Jovi, Maroon 5 and Bruno Mars. A reference corpus (COCA, ca. 520M words) was also used as support material. A list of criteria for designing the exercises was created and implemented. The corpus was tagged for over 200 different linguistic characteristics using the Biber Tagger. The features were then counted with the Biber Tag Count program, which also calculated the position of each song and artist along each of the five major dimensions of register variation for English (Biber, 1988). Exercises were designed and used involving collocations, keywords, register variation, among other major linguistic themes. A journal was kept by the teacher during the lessons, and interviews of the students were conducted, both as ways of throwing light onto the process of learning English in a corpus-based environment