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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