Jan 30 2008
The Best Music Websites For Learning English
I use music a lot in my teaching of English Language Learners. I thought people might find it helpful to see which sites I believe to be the best out there to help teach English — Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced – through music. My students have certainly found them helpful.
Music is a familiar, fun, and engaging tool to use in learning a second language. This list includes sites that have music to listen to, activities for students to do, and ways for them to create their own.
This is latest of my “The Best…” series, also known as Websites Of The Year. The sites on this list can be found, along with 8,000 other categorized links, on my website. I am also in the process of designing a special page on my website so that it’s easy for students to access my lists of The Best Websites on their own.
Here are what I believe to be the thirteen (well, really fifteen) best music websites for learning English:
Number thirteen is the Music Page from the Language Guide, the best audio/picture dictionary on the Web for English Language Learners. It’s obviously important for students to understand some basic music vocabulary.
Number twelve is Musical English Lessons International. This site has an enormous number of ready-to-print activities that students can use to develop their English skills while listening to music.
The English Language Listening Lab Online, also known as ELLO, has a good Music page that I’m ranking eleventh. Students can listen to pop tunes and many, but not all, have follow-up exercises that can be accessed by clicking on “Word Challenge.”
Number ten is a new site called Lyrics Mode. This is clearly the best source for accurate song lyrics to print-out without having to put-up with countless annoying pop-up adds that are prevalent in other lyrics sites.
I’m very tentatively naming another new site called Songza as a sort of companion on this list to Lyrics Mode, though I’m not giving it a “formal” rank. Songza has millions of songs you can play “on-demand,” including many that I use in my teaching. You can also create your own “playlists.” It’s an incredible resource to be able to use in your classroom. However, even though everything I have read about Songza and several similar sites in numerous blogs and journals doesn’t give any indication of potential legal issues, I still don’t understand how they can offer this service without violating copyright laws. Until that’s clearer in my mind I don’t feel I can give it an official spot on my list.
Number nine is the City College of Manchester’s Grammar With Songs site that allows students to complete clozes (also known as “gap-fill”) exercises while listening to a number of popular songs.
Yahoo Korea English Songs is number eight with scores of simple animated and audio songs with text specifically designed to teach English.
Number seven is EFL Club Songs, which has been a favorite of my students. It, too, has clozes to be completed while listening to popular songs.
Number six is another site by the incomparable Henny Jellema, who creates the most imaginative ESL/EFL exercises available on the Web. This one is simply called Learn English By Songs. As with his exercises that have made my other lists, I’d just suggest going there instead of my describing it here.
Number five is Teaching Language With Music. Not only can you print out tons of activities for free from the site, you can also print-out a fabulous book listing songs that are appropriate for teaching all sorts of English themes.
I’m putting My Pop Studio at number four. Students can create their own recording artist, the music and the lyrics. It’s a real fun activity.
Number three are actually two musical games created by Luke Whittaker — The Sound Factory and Break In The Road. They also both made it near the top of my Best Online Learning Games list.
Number two is a new site called Rap Happy. This is a “qualified” ranking. It’s a great site where students can easily create their own raps, and then email the link to a teacher or to themselves to post the url address on a blog or online journal. I’ve spent some time on the site, and I haven’t seen inappropriate raps, so it appears that the site owners are trying to monitor for that. I’d just suggest that teachers might want to continue to check it.
And, now, for the number one-ranked site — The Best Music Website For Learning English…..It’s The Sims On Stage. This wonderful site lets users easily record themselves singing karaoke and hosts the performances on-site. If students don’t want to sing, they can listen to countless others who have while the lyrics are streaming across the screen.
So goes another “The Best…” list. If you liked this post, consider subscribing to this blog for free.
5 responses so far
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Great work Larry, a usual. Just a detail. You seemed to get tangled when linking and both numers 12 and 11 links lead you to the same site.
Very best!
Hi Larry,
This is a great list. I’d love to add Flocabulary to the mix - http://www.flocabulary.com. We teach language through hip-hop and have products that are being used in thousands of schools worldwide. Our music has been featured on MTV and CNN. I hope your readers will check it out.
Thanks again for compiling this great resource.
Hi Larry,
I agree with the above comments - a really helpful list for anyone looking to expand their English vocabulary. I would also like to point out that a new children’s English product due to launch in China called Pingu’s English (http://www.pingusenglish.com/) incorporates music into its syllabus. This helps to keep the children focused on what they are learning in a fun and interactive way.
I’ll be sure to check out some of the sites you highlight in your piece!
This is wonderful. There are few examples of integrating music into the curriculum. Great work assembling this list!
Thanks Larry
Top 10 Lyric Search Engines
From Wendy Boswell
Searching for lyrics to a song can be a daunting task, but not with these Top Ten Lyric Search Engines. Find a song lyric, do a song search by lyric, and more. Find the song lyrics you’re searching for on the Web quickly and easily!
1. Get Lyrical - a Lyrics Search Engine
Get Lyrical is an excellent lyrics search engine. You can search by song lyric, artist, song, or album. And if you still can’t find the song you’re looking for in their excellent (and sizable) lyrics database, you can check out the Get Lyrical Message Boards and ask the community there to help you figure out a song lyric. Fast and easy lyric search, good, relevant results - I highly recommend Get Lyrical for your lyric search needs.
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2. Lyrics Robot-Lyrics Search Engine
The thing I like most about Lyrics Robot is their absolutely huge artist directory. Just click on any of the alphabet letters on the Lyrics Robot home page and you’ll retrieve a wide range of artists. Lyrics Robot claims to have “3 Million Entries - 500,000 Songs - 40,000 Artists”, which is obviously a lot. The lyric search process seems a bit clunky, but I was still able to find some good answers. Sort your lyric search results by site to get a more organized lyric search results page.
3. LyricSearch.net-Song Lyrics Search Engine
Search over 100,000 songs with LyricSearch.net. I was able to find good results with my search for what the world needs now, including other songs and albums of Burt Bacharach that I didn’t even know existed. All lyric search results for LyricSearch.net open in a new window;I didn’t much like this but it’s a small issue. Good index of lyrics and easily implemented lyric search.
4. MetroLyrics-A Lyric Search Engine and More
MetroLyrics features over 262,000 music lyrics (that’s quite a few), but even better than MetroLyrics lyric search are the various music categories that they have available, such as list of artists by music genre, Top 100 Most Popular lyrics, and Christmas music, which at the time of this writing spanned over 20 jam-packed pages.
5. My Lyrics Finder -MLFinder-Lyrics Search Engine
Simple and uncluttered, MLFinder delivers fast and relevant results with a few little extras: look at your lyric search results and you’ll see when that song was added, an opportunity to buy the song lyric (sheet music), buy posters of the artist, or send that lyric to a friend. MLFinder has “10,000+ artists - 1,000,000+ song lyrics & growing.” Don’t forget to check out the Billboard Hot 100; click on any of the song URL’s and you’ll be taken to that song’s lyrics.
6. Rock Wisdom-Song Quotes Search
Rock Wisdom features an immense database of song quotes-”the main purpose of this collection of quotes from Rock and Roll music is to celebrate and provide a documented reference to an under appreciated form of literature.” You can search by subject, search by artist,browser through popular artists, get a random rock quote, or look up the full lyrics (this links to outside sites). Over 70 categories of Rock Wisdom goodness; this site is an online archive of sorts for rock and roll history.
7. Lyrical Discord-Lyrics Database
Search lyrics by artist, song, or keyphrase with Lyrical Discord. The most popular songs are featured right on the front page. here’s an example of what I liked most about Lyrical Discord-I did a search for hard day’s night and not only did it bring up the classic Beatles song, but also other song lyrics in that album, all song lyrics by that artist and other albums by that artist. A nice touch for anyone who’s not looking for song lyrics alone.
8. A to Z Lyrics Universe
A to Z Lyrics Universe features over 50,000 searchable song lyrics. You can browse by artist or band name in their alphabetical directory, or you can just type in a lyric snippet. Song lyrics results will open up in a new window. A to Z Lyrics Universe features mostly newer songs from the year 2000 and up; lots of hip-hop, Top 40 kind of stuff here.
9. SongMe.com-Lyrics Search Engine
In addition to a strong lyric search experience (over 74,000 songs indexed at the time of this writing), Songme.com also offers some unique user features such as artist birthdays displayed on the front page, DailyKeys, links to the most popular song requests by day, and a list on the far left side of the Top 20 Albums (with links to these albums lyrics) on Songme.com.
10. Lyrics Spot.com-Lyrics Search, Album Covers
Lyrics Spot not only has a sizable database of lyrics-over 160,000 at the time of this writing-but they offer CD cover images of whatever artist you’re looking for as well. Search by artist, album or song, browse the alphabetical directory, check out Lyrics Spot’s top songs, or check out the Billboard Top 12 albums, with links to song lyrics.
(source about.com)