THE PEDAGOCIAL POTENTIAL OF POPULAR MUSIC LYRICS IN TEACHING GRAMMAR IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS: SENTENCE STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH
THE PEDAGOCIAL POTENTIAL OF POPULAR MUSIC LYRICS IN TEACHING GRAMMAR IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS: SENTENCE STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH

Summary/Abstract: Popular music is an integral part of the cultural landscape of the modern world, and its influence on language and communication cannot be overstated. This paper examines the advantages of integrating popular music lyrics into foreign language classrooms, with a particular focus on sentence structures. Using a corpus of 802 songs with more than 200 million views on YouTube, the research aims to explore the accuracy of popular music lyrics with respect to different sentence structures and subject-verb agreement. The initial hypothesis suggested that popular music lyrics would predominantly contain grammatical errors, which our analysis revealed showing that 396 songs were grammatically correct (49.37%), while 406 songs contained errors (50.62%), resulting in a total of 1506 syntactic errors, 794 of them being related to sentence structure errors and 417 to the incorrect subject-verb agreement. The remaining errors (295) were related to double negatives, which we did not analyze in this paper. The most frequent sentence structure errors included the omission of auxiliary verbs (470 instances), auxiliary verbs that were used as main verbs (110), incorrect verb order (76), bare infinitives that were used as auxiliary verbs (77), and incorrect use of objective pronouns (61). The study utilized a combination of manual and descriptive analysis to investigate the potential benefits of incor- porating popular music lyrics into foreign language classrooms. The findings indicate that such integration can help students develop meta-language awareness and expose them to various language registers. Overall, the research demonstrates the pedagogical potential of popular music lyrics as a resource for foreign language instruction, particularly for teaching grammar and syntax. By using popular music lyrics in foreign language classrooms, educators can cre- ate an engaging and diverse learning environment that helps students comprehend and utilize language in various contexts, ultimately leading to more effective language learning outcomes

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