15 Activities with Hip-Hop

Dictogloss – Explain to your students that you will dictate some of the lyrics and they will listen without taking any notes. Put students in pairs or small groups and have them reconstruct the text to the best of their ability and emphasize that collaboration is more important than being perfect. At the end of the activity, show students the original text so that they can compare their work. If you are using the Test-Teach-Test model of instruction, running a dictogloss in the beginning might be an easy way to diagnose how much of the lesson’s target language your students already understand. 

Running Dictation – Print the chorus or a short selection from a verse on paper and put it up on the walls around your room. Have students form pairs. One student will run up to the wall, read the text and run back to dictate it. The other partner must listen and write. This activity is great for morning classes because the physical activity makes people more alert.

Screaming Dictation – Very similar to a running dictation. Students form pairs and stand on opposite ends of the room. One partner has the text on a piece of paper and must scream across the room. The other partner must listen very carefully and write on a piece of paper. This activity will certainly get very noisy, but it’s the good kind of noise. The screaming students must carefully articulate and pronounce words, and the receiving partner gets useful listening practice. In the event there’s a breakdown in communication, students will have to use language of clarification to continue the dictation. Excuse me, say that again please. What did you say? 

Predicting Gaps – Filling-in-the-blanks is one of the most common and overused music activities, but I like using this variation. Before students listen to the music, have them predict the words in the gapped lyrics. This could be a useful diagnostic tool to identify vocabulary and grammar your students may already know. You can check work by showing them the lyrics or by listening to the song a couple of times.

Found Poetry – Use rap album covers or lyrics to help students write found poetry. At the end of the activity, students can share their poems by reading them aloud or by publishing them on a class website. A complete lesson plan is available at ESLhiphop.

Arranging Lyrics – Take some lines from the verse or chorus and rearrange them so that they are out of order. Have students work in pairs or small groups to predict the right sequence and then listen to the song to check. Completing this activity is not a reliable indication that your students actually comprehend the song, but it will give them useful practice for distinguishing sounds. For this reason, it puts less pressure on your students to understand everything, making it useful as a warm-up.

Using Instrumentals – Who says hip-hop and rap music is only for listening? Why not give your students the opportunity to bust rhymes as well?! Many hip-hop songs also have instrumental versions available on YouTube. Students can write their own songs and poems and recite them over the instrumentals, or you can set up a class karaoke lesson and practice the songs previously learned.

Video Info Gap – What’s hip-hop music without music videos? Students pair up and sit face-to-face. One student is looking at the video and the other partner has her back to the screen. Play the video without any music or sound. One partner must describe what is happening in the video while the other listens on. Pause the video in the middle and have partners switch. Conduct a whole-class summary of what they have just seen and watch the video with music in its entirety. 

Comparing Video to Lyrics – Have students compare the lyrics to the images and actions found in a song’s music video. This task has a number of possible objectives, but it is particularly useful for examining and discussing literal and figurative language.

Chain Discussions – Group discussions are always good for pre-listening and post-listening activities, but they have a tendency to fall flat and fizzle out rather quickly. Using a chain drill will ensure that discussions do not fall flat, making it valuable fluency practice. To set up the activity, take half of your students and make them stand in a circle, facing outwards. Have the rest of the students stand in front of one other person, so that there is an inner and outer circle. Start the discussion and every 90-120 seconds yell, ‘Switch!’ Students in the outside circle must take a step to the left, and the process is repeated for as long as you like. 

Listening for Rhythm – Music of any genre is a great tool for listening to and imitating English rhythm and stress patterns. A complete lesson plan for practicing rhythm is available here.

Rewriting Lyrics – Hip-hop music uses not only a lot of figurative and idiomatic language, but also AAVE which is a non-standard variety of English. Having the students rewrite metaphorical language in plain English will invoke critical thinking skills. Rewriting the ‘rap dialect’ into prescriptive English will also heighten awareness of language forms while giving students a chance to appreciate a variety of English not used by society’s status quo. 

Reading Lesson, Listen at End – Use the lyrics as the primary material for a reading lesson, and then listen to the song at the end of class as a reward!

Distinguishing Minimal Pairs – Rappers have an excellent command of the language, and they cleverly play with words and use minimal pairs in their rhymes. One great example is KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police”  which interchanges the words ‘officer’ and ‘overseer.’ While they’re technically not true minimal pairs, they are similar enough making this track perfect for sound discrimination and pronunciation practice. Start the video at 1:36 to see what I mean:

Call to Action

So there you have it! 15 ideas so that you can finally start using hip-hop. For this post, there will be no discussion questions, but a call to action instead. Do you want to accept the challenge and try something new? Do you want to bring a new edge to your lessons? Do you just want to be different and get out of the comfort of your routine? Try one of these activities and share your experiences in the comments below!

The post 15 Quick Ideas for Using Hip-Hop in Class appeared first on ESL Hip Hop.

Complete Lesson Plan with The Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By”

By the end of this lesson, students will have: discussed stories of unrequited love, listened for and identified word stress and rhythm in sentences, read and transcribed lyrics into simple English, and shared their interpretation of lyrics in a jigsaw activity.

• Level: Intermediate to Advanced (B1 – C1)
• Time: 50-75 minutes with homework and followup
• Activity: Reading; Listening; Speaking
• Topic: Broken hearts; unrequited love
• Language Aims: 
  • Word stress and rhythm (primary aim)
  • keeps on + gerund (secondary aim)
• Materials: 
  • Music Video for The Pharcydes “Passin’ Me By” http://youtu.be/QjsPG0Kspxo
  • Instrumetals Only http://youtu.be/v8UH1kuZ57s
  • Lesson Plan and Workseets – PDF
  • mobile devices optional

Procedures:

1. Write the following sentence on the board: She keeps on ____________. Elicit the meaning of keeps on. (It is a inseparable phrasal verb which means to continue.) Have students complete the sentence in pairs, writing as many different examples as possible.
2. Ask for volunteers to share their ideas and write them on the board. As your write down ideas, disregard any errors at this point. Explicit correction might interrupt the flow of this warm-up, but a less intrusive form of corrective feedback is recast, which means to repeat your student’s utterance without the error. For example:
   1. Student, “She keeps on to study English.” Teacher, “Good idea! She keeps on studying English. Next idea please?”
   2. The advantage of recast is that it doesn’t disrupt the lesson very much, and it is less teacher-centered than explicit correction. However, students usually do not notice the corrected language in recast, so it may not be a reliable form of error correction
3. Tell Ss that the chorus (often called ‘the hook’ in hip-hop) is She keeps on passing me by. Have students discuss these questions in small groups and then conduct whole class feedback:
   1. What verb comes after ‘keeps on’ ? A gerund always follows the phrasal verb ‘keep on.’ I will keep on studying. I kept studying. He keeps studying every day. etc
   2. This is a love a song. The singer says, “She keeps on passing me by.” Is it a happy or sad love song?
4. At this point, your students will probably have decided that it is a sad love song. Tell a personal anecdote of an unrequited love from your youth (or just invent one, or tell a story about your “friend”). For example:
   1. In high school, I had a very big crush on a girl who was two years older than me. I really wanted to hold her hand and give her a hug. She broke my heart one day when she told me she didn’t love me… 
   2. Have one or two students share similar stories to the class and write down any incidental vocabulary on the board. Drill and follow-up new vocabulary with personalized questions. In my experience, students usually giggle when revealing old childhood romances, but there’s always a few students who don’t mind sharing. Creating a very positive rapport and atmosphere of trust is essential for a topic of this kind!
5. Setting up and running the jigsaw:
   1. Form 3 groups, each with 3-5 students. Ideally, your class size is a multiple of 3, but you may have to adjust the group size depending on the number of learners in class.
   2. Give each member in a group one of the worksheets (attached as a PDF) and have them discuss the lyrics together. Have them discuss the gist meaning of their excerpt by writing a short 1 or 2 sentence summary in plain English. They may use dictionaries or access the web on mobile devices, but be available to assist students with any problematic language. Run this discussion for about 5 minutes.
   3. Take one student from each group and have them form a new group. Students will present their summaries and interpretation from the previous discussion to the new group for another 5-10 minutes.
   4. Conduct whole class feedback and have groups share their summaries and interpretations.
6. Language Presentation: Rhythm
   1. Write this sentence on the board, and have all students read it aloud, very slowly, one word at a time: Some of the rappers should’ve made the tracks. Ask students to make a judgement: did their slow reading sound like natural speech? Why not? Try to elicit the word rhythm. 
      
   2. Explain that English has rhythm, just like music. In order to maintain the rhythm, the stressed words in a sentence occur in regular intervals, or beats. Illustrate this point by snapping your fingers and repeating these sentences. Do it slowly at first so that students notice that your snapping is synced to the stressed words. Repeat the drill again and have students repeat after you.
      1. Rappers make tracks.
      2. The rappers make tracks. 
      3. The rappers make the tracks.
      4. Some of the rappers make the tracks.
      5. Some of the rappers should‘ve made the tracks.
   3. Ask students to determine what words are stressed based on the snapping drill, in small groups. Conduct whole class feedback.
   4. Explain or help students discover that the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs usually take the stress in a sentence. Prepositions, articles and auxiliary verbs are usually unstressed and become reduced in order to maintain the rhythm.
7. Language Practice: In groups, have students identify the stressed words from the excerpts in the jigsaw activity. Once groups decide which words are stressed, listen to the song as a whole class and have students listen for the rhythm. I usually encourage snapping or tapping at this point because it makes learners more aware of the measurement of time.

Variation with Social Media

Instead of listening to the song as a whole class, have students use mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) to access a class website with “Passing Me By”. I recommend setting up a Facebook group page for your class because it’s easy to share YouTube videos.  Have students leave comments in response to the song. You can set any number of comprehension questions or tasks for your students to complete on Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites.

Possible Followup 

For homework, have your students practice reading their excerpts aloud to the beat of the instrumentals. There are instrumental versions of most hip-hop songs on YouTube. When students return to class, you can have students read aloud the excerpts in groups to the music.

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