Exploring Students’ Context Representations by Using Songs in English With a Social Content

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research study based on a pedagogical experience of two pre-service English teachers with seventh graders. The main goal was to analyze the students’ context representations, after using some songs in English as a trigger for reflection. The pedagogical implementation of the songs was designed from a critical pedagogy perspective which allows students to have a more visible role within their English classes. The data were collected through students’ artifacts, classroom observations, closed-ended questionnaires, and dialogues. The results show that after analyzing the contents of some songs in English, students felt motivated to share their own representation about what they face as adolescents and to express their feelings about them.

Keywords

• English as a foreign language students
• context representation
• critical pedagogy
• songs in English