USING SONGS IN ENGLISH CLASS.

Teaching English can become bored if you don´t introduce some different ideas every day. Teachers should try to be innovator in our classes every day.
The idea is just not only grammar but including other aspects such as : phonetics, vocabulary (crosswords, quizzes, word searchers..) , role-plays, and why cannot include a song every week ?, just at the end of the week it is a good idea to break the routine, give them a break and offer the possibility to work with an English song.
First, we can listen to our students preferences ,they even can get the song , and then the teacher prepares the exercises , we can look for the lyrics of any song in this page:
http://www.lyrics.net/ , we choose the author o the title of the song and we get the complete text of the song that we want to work with.
There are lot of possibilities to work with songs:
-Fill in the gaps.
-Match the pictures with the pieces of the song.
-Listen to the song and answer the questions
-Find words or phrases in the song with these meanings...
I have been working some songs with my ESO students, in each song we can work some grammar point. My favourite titles are:



-Spice Girls: if you wanna be my lover. (Conditional clauses)
-Gery Halliwell: It´s raining men! (Present Continuous)
-Aqua : Barbie Girl. (Abilities, Orders)
-George Michael: Last Christmas.(Past Simple tenses)
-Sting. Every breath you take.(Present Simple)
-Grease. You´re the want that I want....( Relative clauses)

Sometimes you can find the song in some textbooks , such as English File, Oxford Exchange...
Other times I download the song from the internet.
The textbook for 2nd year of Bachillerato (Take a note 2.Longman) offers us a song in each lesson:
Unit 1: No particular place to go by Chuck Berry.(Past tenses)
Unit 2:We are the champions by Queen. (Past Particples)
Unit 3: Should I stay or shoud I go? by The Clash.(Conditional Sentences)
.......
Using songs in class we give a break to our stressing students at the end of the term,for example.

So , I advise you to put a song , not only in your life , but in your class.