Hi, I’m currently teaching a student privately who is looking to improve their lyric writing in English. Whilst I have some musical ability, I’ve never taught this kind of subject before. Does anyone have any materials or advice?
Lyrics are just poems for music. Try looking up stuff for poetry. Since this is private, maybe you could go through some poems/songs that match their level and point out what makes it work (like rhythm, rhymes etc…). I sadly don’t get to teach stuff like that here but I remember I did learn it when I was young in the UK. Try looking up “keystage” resources. It might be a bit juvenile though as they would be primary school resources. If their super advanced, there are plenty of web articles for writing lyrics you could adapt. Hope that helps.
That sounds fun. Does their L1 have similar chunking, stress etc as english? Might be good to analyse some songs with that in mind if not. Then challenge them to change bits of songs with alternative phrases that would also fit those patterns.
Collocation work also useful I think, perhaps for key words that often turn up in songs? (depends what kind they are writing) You can use corpus based analysis for this and your own common sense. Could also work backwards from what they’d want to say in L1, then draw attention to the need to re-collocate by finding appropriate english keywords and then the collocations around them and see what might work.
And then just lots of looking at actual songs and noting nice words combos and what rhythmic patterns they can fit really! Could try an approach where they have to take a phrase each from say twelve different songs and recombine and alter them and say it in rhythm to you. (Probably not a good idea to do this approach for songs they intend to publish of course, but just for learning)
There might be some unique grammar shortcuts to be taught as well depending on what comes up and how impressionistic the writing is
2 comments
Lyrics are just poems for music. Try looking up stuff for poetry. Since this is private, maybe you could go through some poems/songs that match their level and point out what makes it work (like rhythm, rhymes etc…). I sadly don’t get to teach stuff like that here but I remember I did learn it when I was young in the UK. Try looking up “keystage” resources. It might be a bit juvenile though as they would be primary school resources. If their super advanced, there are plenty of web articles for writing lyrics you could adapt. Hope that helps.
That sounds fun. Does their L1 have similar chunking, stress etc as english? Might be good to analyse some songs with that in mind if not. Then challenge them to change bits of songs with alternative phrases that would also fit those patterns.
Collocation work also useful I think, perhaps for key words that often turn up in songs? (depends what kind they are writing)
You can use corpus based analysis for this and your own common sense. Could also work backwards from what they’d want to say in L1, then draw attention to the need to re-collocate by finding appropriate english keywords and then the collocations around them and see what might work.
And then just lots of looking at actual songs and noting nice words combos and what rhythmic patterns they can fit really! Could try an approach where they have to take a phrase each from say twelve different songs and recombine and alter them and say it in rhythm to you. (Probably not a good idea to do this approach for songs they intend to publish of course, but just for learning)
There might be some unique grammar shortcuts to be taught as well depending on what comes up and how impressionistic the writing is