Lyricstraining: computer activity

Hello, I am Mireia Núñez and in the following lines I aim to present you my computers’ activity.

Description of Context

Target audience: 6^th Primary. However, it can be used in different ages and moment of the year.

Placement in the curriculum: Àmbit lingüístic (dimensió oral, expressió escrita).

Previous knowledge: The students are supposed to be competent in the use of computers. There is not any previous content that students need in order to do the activity presented below.

Description of the activity

Name of the activity: Lyricstraining (https://es.lyricstraining.com/).

Description: This activity is used in order to practice listening. Each student will have a computer and will go into the website called “lyricstraining”. There, they will find different nowadays and famous songs organised by levels depending on the lyrics difficulty. They will have to choose one song and listen to it. At the same time that they will listen the song, they will have to fill the lyrics’ gaps.

 As you can see, songs are organised by levels (green, orange and red).

Also, each song has 4 different levels.

Lesson objectives:

- To practice listening.

-To learn how to use “lyricstraining” website.

Competences

Personal competences: Autonomy and initiative competence. Students reflect about their self-identity.

Communicative competence: Linguistic and audio-visual communicative competence. Students communicate their ideas and the new knowledge while learning a second language.

Methodological competence: Learning to learn competence. Students dispose of an optimal environment to guide their own learning process.

Social and civic competences: Knowledge and interaction with the world. To the extent that the students identify social problems and promote social awareness about it. Social and civic competence. Students identify social problems and promote social awareness about it.

Digital competence

Time: it can be used one full session or it can be used at some point of several sessions, for instance the last 10 minutes. Moreover it can be used for fast finishers if we have a computer in class.

Focus: listen a song and complete the lyrics.

Description of the activity: listen a song that kids will choose depending on their English competence and complete the lyrics while listening it.

Educational quality of it for the EFL class: it is a very useful and motivating tool in order to work on listening. They must combine listening and wrting in order to get a good result (depending on how many words they have filled and the time they get more or less points). Also, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, this activity is high demanding because they have to pay a lot of attention and listen carefully since you cannot pause the song.

Language accuracy: this activity basically involves listening skills. However, students will also be working vocabulary, grammar and writing indirectly.  

Description of the Implementation of the activity

Materials required

• Computers (1 per person)

Class management: The students are going to work individually.  As well the experts in TIC are going to help the teacher and the pupils, especially at the beginning of the activity or the first days that pupils use this website.

Evaluation: The teacher is going to assess the work done by the students through individual observation during the class time.

Trouble-shooting: Using computers and internet can some time become a chaos. That’s why it is important to have different strategies to deal with the class. For example, the teacher could have an ICT assistant to help their partner with technological problems. Also, at some points the teacher could say “switch off the screen and look at me” to catch students’ attention. Furthermore, to check that everybody have been working, at the end of the class the teacher could check the websites checked. Moreover, the teacher should have some activities prepared for fast-finishers, such as listening to another song, writing a story or making a drawing about the song they listened to…

Differentiation: Multiple intelligences are involved as well as different ways of learning (listening, kinaesthetic…). These promotes everybody’s understanding and participation. Also is a fun that will also motivate that students who normally have trouble with English. Since the songs from this website are already organised into levels, kids will try one song and see if it’s good or too difficult or too easy.  Therefore, all students the most advanced ones but also the ones with a lower English competence will feel comfortable with the activity. Also, using ICT is a way to reinforce inclusion (maybe a student that is not good at English is very good at ICT).

I hope you think this website is interesting and useful!

Mireia