El género musical pop como estrategia didáctica para mejorar la habilidad de escucha en inglés como lengua extranjera

Abstract

Given the connection of music with language and the effectiveness of the use of songs for the development of Listening Skills, as well as the importance of Listening as a necessary communicative skill for performance in oral communication in a Foreign Language; the main aim was to improve the Listening Skills in English as a Foreign Language of the eleventh graders of an official educational institution, located in the city of Medellín, in the year 2019, through a teaching strategy based on the pop music genre, due to the advantages that this genre offers at a lexical level and the ease of understanding the songs thanks to its oral and auditory clarity. The intervention was applied in the English class for a thirty-hour period, with a series of planned activities based on the use of songs from the pop music genre for the improvement of listening skills in three dimensions: 1) Identification of specific information, 2) Identification of general information and 3) Understanding of meaning in the oral messages of the songs, which were previously chosen by the students according to their preferences within this music genre. The activities were distributed in three moments: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. In this experimental study, with a quantitative approach, a listening test and a face-to-face interview were applied to measure participants' listening skills scores and performance levels according to the CEF, before and after the implementation of the teaching strategy based on the use of pop songs. The results show that the use of pop songs is an effective teaching strategy for the improvement not only of Listening Skills in English as a Foreign Language, but also in oral production and in the increase and retention of vocabulary; as well as in the students' affective domain. These results have implications for the methodologies applied in the ESL class for the improvement of students' listening skills.