Lyrics

• Employ lyrics as mnemonic reminders in songs that you write yourself. For example, it can be very difficult to conjugate verbs, particularly irregular ones. Write lyrics that will fix the tenses in the student's mind: "Catch, caught/ buy, bought/ go, went/ spend and spent..."
  
  Assign your student to translate the lyrics of popular regional songs into English. Not only will this acclimate the student to the conventions of poetry in English, but it will also force them to work with words they might not be comfortable with to conform to the meter and rhyme.
  
  Create assignments that ask students to first write out the lyrics of a song, and then to tell what they really mean. MusicalEnglishLessons.com posted such a lesson for the Beatles song "I Saw Her Standing There" that you can use as a model.
  
  Acknowledge one of the difficulties of teaching English through music: lyrics are sometimes written with poor grammar. This is an opportunity for the student of English to correct the grammar of the artist. In his song "Only the Good Die Young," Billy Joel sings, "that never hurt no one." The English student, in correcting Joel, will learn both the proper word to use (any), but will also learn that speakers sometimes do not adhere to the rules.
  
  

Performance

• Encourage students to perform songs in English, as this allows you to gently correct their pronunciation and allows them to hear difficult words in the context of a sentence. This kind of karaoke instruction also gives you the opportunity to teach regional idioms and vocabulary through popular song. For example, Slang City notes that the narrator of the Barenaked Ladies hit "One Week" uses the idiom "get that together," meaning to reassume a normal attitude. It also mentions pop culture references such as "The X-Files," an American television show.
  
  Set lyrics to easy songs that all of your students understand, like local nursery rhymes. Start with easy topics, such as the weather or eating, but begin increasing the difficulty. Your students could learn English by writing lyrics commemorating the best day of their lives to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star." Hold an informal concert in which the students sing their songs.