Musique mardi: oh, the possibilities

A sample word web with important words from the song “Je suis chez moi” by Black M

The beautiful thing about using music videos in class is that, quite literally, everybody wins.  You get to use authentic resources on any topic you choose, students get to watch music videos, and there is quite literally no end to the variety of activities that you can do.  It’s also a great complement to playing music in the background during activities (which I am also a huge advocate of).

My students get excited every week without fail when they realize it’s musique mardi.  (Sometimes I wonder if they think that you need both words in order to say “Tuesday”.)  Some weeks we watch the video and I ask them whether or not they liked it.  Some weeks the whole class period is dedicated to a lesson based on the lyrics, or the context, or the life of the artist.  The fact that we change it up keeps things from feeling stale.  The only constant is that they know they get to watch a video and listen to a song.

We often do pre-viewing/pre-listening activities, such as:

• Looking at a word cloud made from important words in the lyrics; students might look up the words they don’t know, or guess at their meanings, and make a hypothesis about the theme of the song or images that they expect to see
• Students have a series of screen-grabs from the video; they might make a list of words they expect to hear in the lyrics, put the images in a logical order, and/or create a hypothesis about the theme of the song.
• Students read one or two lines from the song and create an image that they think would be an appropriate illustration.
• A traveling dictation of some of the lyrics

Activities during the song or video include:

• Fill-in-the-blanks copy of lyrics
• Creation of images that represent the song (before watching the video)
• Students listen to the song, then see clips from several different music videos (without sound); they decide which clip goes with the song they listened to and create a justification for their answer
• Students have a series of actions or events that happen in the video; as they watch and listen, they put them in chronological order
• Choose lines from the lyrics as captions for screen-grabs from the video
• Separate statements into true and false groups based on what they see in the video and/or hear in the song

Post-viewing or listening extension activities might be:

• A group or class discussion and vote on the most important lyric in the song
• A storyboard of the music video that they would make after listening to the song
• An examination of cultural messages in the lyrics or images from the video (the IMAGE model from Glisan & Donato’s ACTFL publication Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High-Leverage Teaching Practices would be amazing for this)

The beautiful thing about music is that options exist for songs without a video, or that don’t have a video that is super appropriate for students of a particular age group (or at all).  Students can still engage with the content without visuals, or with a few screen grabs, or discrete images that I’ve chosen to illustrate the video and clue them in to its dominant events and themes.

Plus, music is fun, and our students don’t spend a ton of time watching music videos in class, so the novelty is REAL and it lasts for a looooooooong time.  (Mid-year: musique mardi still gets a cheer from my jaded sophomores. That is a solid win.)

My students are especially excited right now because we are solidly into March, and March is the month of Manie Musicale.  If you’ve never heard of it, it’s modeled off of the March Madness bracket, but instead of basketball teams going up against each other, two music videos face off and students vote on which one they like the best.  They are also really excited to create their own music videos for their favorite French songs; this project does take a few days in class, but I have found that the off-the-charts student engagement is worth the time that we spend working on the projects.  Every time they hear their song (for the rest of their high school career!), they get really excited.  Some lip-sync the words, some break out the dance that they choreographed for their music video.

If you’re interested in using music videos, March is a great time to experiment with them if you haven’t so far this year!  Show one as a treat at the end of class, make reference to one in your lesson, or ask students to find one to submit for class review!  Also, there is a Facebook group where people request and recommend videos that fit with specific themes–it’s an excellent place to start if you’re looking for something specific!  So many exclamation points!  This is exciting!

If you’re looking for more info about using music videos in the language classroom, Cecile Laine has written extensively about her use of music and songs of the week on her blog–the things her students do with the songs she chooses are extremely cool, so definitely check that out.  Lisa Shepard has written about using songs in the TL as well–excellent stuff.  Mme. Farabaugh has a fantastic blog post on Manie Musicale, too, with a sample bracket. (genius!) Search “Manie Musicale” on Spotify to find people’s playlists from previous years, too!