How to find pop songs to use in your French or Spanish classroom

Free resources to bring the joy of music to your students!

Want to send students out of your classroom with a lesson they literally can’t forget? A great target language song will stick in your kids’ heads all day! I’ve had students tell me they added songs from class to their playlists, followed the artist on social media, “Shazam-ed” the music (I’m not even sure what that means!) and listened again and again until they had the song memorized. In fact, using target language music in my French classes has been one of the single biggest strategies in improving student engagement, both inside and outside the classroom.

click for 5 Activities to Incorporate Pop Music in your Classroom

There’s a lot of research showing extramural language learning, (immersive language activities students voluntarily take on outside of class) is a strong predictor of future language proficiency. So, as a classroom teacher, I want to do everything I can to introduce students to target-language sources they might want to investigate more deeply outside of class. Music is a great way to do this, and opens up so many instructional activities (like this post on 5 activities to incorporate pop music into your world language classroom)! 

One of the biggest barriers I hear from colleagues is the challenge of finding current, school-appropriate music. Finding usable pop music does take some time and investment, but the curricular payoff is worth it! Here are some places you can start.

Lyricstraining.com  

“A great target language song will stick in your kids’ heads all day!”

This fantastic website serves two music-related purposes. First, it has a music-video library in a dozen languages including English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. Users select songs, embed the videos, and upload the lyrics, which are listed by genre in the site catalogue. Need a folk song? Heavy Metal? TV theme song? Christmas song? This searchable library will help you identify potential artists and titles. Second, each song is connected to a digital cloze activity where learners can fill in the blanks in the lyrics as they listen. There are four levels of difficulty ranging from 10% to 100% blank. The video pauses if the player misses a blank, with options to repeat the audio or skip to the next question. The listening activities are pretty challenging, but great practice for your upper level students. Just be sure to preview the videos and songs; not all are school appropriate!

Here’s a short tutorial on using lyricstraining.com 

Talent Search TV Shows

Check out target language talent search shows like “The Voice France; La Plus Belle Voix” or “La Voz; The Voice of Spain” or La Voz México. The judges on these shows are usually popular recording artists. The contestants will often sing well-known covers; this is a good way to expose yourself to a variety of target-language music. And, check back soon for a post with more ideas for using talent search shows in your curriculum.

Manie Musicale (French) and Locura de Marzo (Spanish)

Created by practicing classroom teachers, Manie Musicale and Locura de Marzo are the world language answer to March Madness. Students vote for their favorite songs in elimination brackets. Your kids can join the online voting in March of each year, or you can simply visit the site for musical inspiration. A huge plus: these songs have been vetted by teachers and are appropriate for classroom use!

Here’s the student-selected winner of the Locura de Marzo 2021 competition. Love it!

Ask students for help

I offer students an open invitation to bring me a school-appropriate, target language song they’d like to use in class. Some students to spend hours pouring through target language songs for your benefit. To add academic structure, I assign a small task connected to the song: list 5 vocabulary words you were able to hear in the song with time stamps, tell me a grammar structure you identified in the song that we could review in class, or write a short review of the song in the target language. Students will be thrilled to see ‘their’ song introduced to their peers!

There are so many great curricular activities you can do with pop songs; finding the song is the hardest part! These lessons are crowd-pleasers! The day after a pop music lesson, kids sometimes tell me, “Madame Bartels, I couldn’t get that song out of my head. I went home and played it for my family. I found the artist’s other music and there’s another song I like better. Can we do that one in class?”

I always tell them, “Absolutely! Yes! That is music to my ears!”

Do you have a favorite technique for finding target language songs? What are your favorite songs or artists for classroom use? Share in the comments!