Singing songs is a great way to help English Language Learners get past their understandable reluctance to speak in a new language, and a good vocabulary-building activity.  In addition, you can create clozes (fill-in-the-gaps) with the lyrics, use them to teach grammar, and have students use the real lyrics as models while they write their own.

It’s easy always been easy to find lyrics on the Internet, though often there are inaccuracies and so many lyrics sites have tons of annoying pop-up ads. I thought I’d create a “The Best…” list that shares places where there appear to be correct lyrics and no pop-ups.

You might also be interested in these other “The Best…” lists:

The Best Music Websites For Learning English
The Best Online Sites For Creating Music
The Best Online Karaoke Sites For English Language Learners

Here are my choices for The Best Places To Find Lyrics On The Web:

Lyrster is a search engine that appears to search only collections of lyrics to songs. Just type in a few words and your results show links to the complete lyrics.  It performed quite well in my tests. The sites it searches include some, but I don’t believe all, of the other sites on this list.

Lyrics Fly is one of the best sites out there for finding song lyrics. You can also use it to find music audio and videos, but I’m primarily interested in the lyrics. The Make Use Of blog calls it “lyric search on steroids.”

Lyrics On Call

Lyrics Mode

Just Lyrics

E Lyrics

Lyreach is a new site that helps you find the full lyrics to a song by just typing in a few of the words your remember.

Listen Music is a new web application that allows access to many, many songs. One nice feature is that you can also get the lyrics easily & quickly.

Batlyrics is a new site that looks like a great place to quickly and easily find song lyrics.

Instalyrics is a new site that shows you the lyrics to any song very, very quickly, along with a music video that goes along with it. The lay-out is very “clean” and it replaces Batlyrics as my favorite place for music videos and lyrics.

LyricsNMusic is a nice site that lets you easily search for lyrics and you can a very clean and accessible copy. It also finds music videos of the song. What I particularly like about it, though, is that is shows the lyrics at the top and the video at the bottom, so you can play the music and show the lyrics without students getting distracted by the video. Other sites show the lyrics right next to the video.

I’d certainly be interested in hearing other suggestions, so please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

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