Lyrics and language awareness

Abstract

Commercially successful pop lyrics are an important part of students’ lives, represent authentic language material, are easily accessible, and may thus constitute a helpful starting point for various aspects of foreign language education. Despite this, they seem to be underexploited,
especially when topics such as grammar instruction are tackled. This may be due to their (traditionally ascribed) “low culture” status and the undesired presence of allegedly ungrammatical content, notably in terms of non-standard features. Based on a corpus of c. 550,000 words, this paper will present an analysis of the salience of such features in English
pop lyrics. The results suggest that the material studied actually features a rich array of nonstandard grammatical phenomena, such as multiple negation, ain’t as auxiliary, me instead of I, copula deletion, etc. (as commonly proscribed in English language education). From a  pedagogical perspective, it is therefore argued that using lyrics in the classroom may offer students a welcome opportunity to engage with various types of grammaticality, introducing them to authentic language in a naturalistic way. More specific issues to be addressed with the eventual aim of raising students’ language awareness through working with pop lyrics are that assessments of grammaticality are (i) very much context-dependent, for instance in terms of acceptability of certain structures and variants in different registers (e.g. lyrics vs. conversation vs. formal writing) and (ii) may also differ across varieties of English represented in the lyrics (e.g. various British dialects and sociolects, African American English as represented in rap, Jamaican Creole
as represented in reggae, etc.).