O ressoar da música nas aulas de inglês: escolha, utilização e novas possibilidades

Abstract

Music, due to the fact that it is a textual genre which circulates in various places, many times is a great motivator to learn foreign language, this because evokes attention and causes curiosity to know the meaning of the lyrics. Music also has the advantage of being a material which has a certain authenticity, because it does not suffer many modifications to become more comprehensible to students. Much has been discussed about the importance of music in English classes, nevertheless, little is known in relation to how it is selected and used by teachers, how students react to its use in the classroom and about the difficulties involved in this. This way, this paper aims to investigate how music is used in the classroom, by identifying the objectives and criteria established by teachers when they choose songs, as well as the ways how the teacher uses music, the results and difficulties of the use of music in the classroom and also suggest an activity which aims use music considering not only the lyrics but also the melody. To achieve this, we carried out a field research, with an exploratory approach, in which a questionnaire was applied and after this an interview was made with the participants. The same questionnaire was available online, being answered by teachers who were not interviewed because of their distance participation. With the data analysis, was possible to verify that music, in English classes, is still considered as a pastime, as defends Gobbi (2001), and also as a pretext to teach grammar, vocabulary or listening, drifting away from the proposal of Costa (2005), who suggests a more comprehensive use of music.