1. Warm-ups:

• Music questionnnaire: the aim is to provide oral and written practice in answering questions. Prepare a handout about listening habits, uses of music and preferences of your class. Ask your students to fill them in without putting ther names, take them in, shuffle them and hand them bach randomly. Students circulate and ask questions to find out whose paper it is (they continue to ask the same person until they get a negative response);

• Extreme opinions: prepare a list of extreme opinions on music and song. Tasks in your handout: 1) What kind of person would make each of these statements? 2) Are they ever true? 3) Change each sentence so that you can agree with it.

2. Suggestopaedia:

• Starting with music: keep a class journal and write in it a few minutes every day. Prepare a 3-5 minutes piece and while it is on, let your class write references in the journal, describing the music or saying what it makes them think of. The aim is to relax or excite students after the previous lesson;

• Musical reactions: the purpose is to develop imaginative skills and promote discussion. Sample handout: 1) If you turned on the radio and heard this piece, what would you do? 2) Imagine somebody who loves it/ hates it; describe the person. 3) If it were the background for an advertisement, what do you think the advertised product would be? 4) Where, in what kind of place would you hear this music?

• Five senses: Ask your students to describe twhat they saw, heard, smelt, felt and tasted while listening to some music piece;

• Film music: find some music relatively unknown to the students. Tell them this is to be a piece for a movie. Prepare a handout on the music (questions about associations, e.g. place, people, actions, name of the film);

• Advertising jingles: after listening to a short piece, students should describe what product will go with it, write a short commercial and read or sing it to the music.

3. Using journals and magazines:

• a magazine interview;

• a pop-group interview (a role play that would require a press-release and an individual biography);

• a group round table;

• working with quotations;

• grammar focus on song titles (how many have proper names, names of places, conditionals, imperatives, etc.) This serves to practice identifying grammatical categories and recognizing ambiguity;

4. Using texts of the songs:

• text completion and construction: cloze for low-level can include a glossary of the missing words; with intermediate you can omit rhyming words; you can delete every 5th, 7th or 9th word or insert an extra word here ahd there;

• pre-teaching words: give your students some words in a random order, e.g.:

river, water

smile, joy, face, light

bells, road

Let them predict what the song is about, using all the given words, and then let them listen to the song and compare it with their predictions;

• partial song dictation: dictate a few lines and ask the students to complete the rest of the verse;

• mass distance dictation: organize the class in pairs and prepare 3-4 sheets with songs; one should take a pencil and write things down; the other goes to a sheet of paper, memorizes as much as he can, then goes back and dictates it to his partner.