How to Create ELT Rap Lyrics?

1. How to Create ELT Rap Lyrics? “Sampling” from Great Literature: • e.g., Listen to Song #6 in the CD: Rapping Shakespeare, Rapping Love: a witty quotation about love from Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, is used as the “hook” (i.e., chorus/refrain) of the song, • *Hook: “Love is a madness most discreet, a choking gall, (and) a preserving sweet.” • And other lines of the song are created through variations on a line from the same play of Shakespeare: • “Heaven is here, where Juliet lives”

2. How to Create ELT Rap Lyrics? Our Lyrics: Song #6. Rapping Shakespeare, Rapping Love *Hook: “Love is a madness most discreet, a choking gall, a preserving sweet!” x 2 (From Shakespeare, ‘Romeo & Juliet’) “Heaven is here, where Juliet lives” (From Shakespeare, ‘Romeo & Juliet’) Love is here, where Romeo lives Humour is here, where Shakespeare lives Wisdom is here, where poets live Faith is here, where writers live Truth is here, where rappers live Joy is here, where music lives Peace is here, where you and I live!

3. e.g., Listen to Song #8 in the CD: I Have Promises to Keep The first line was sampled from Robert Frost’s poem and the line was changed slightly to create an entirely different song. See Robert Frost’s original poem on the right… STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING by Robert Frost Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Repetition and Variation

4. Repetition and Variation • Now, look at the lyrics of this song (#8) in your lyrics book and listen to this song… and see how we have created this song based on sampling (some lines from some famous English poetry), as well as repetition and variation. • a good technique to build in lots of language practice into the song as students rap it.

5. The woods are lonely, dark and deep But I have to go on: I have promises to keep The journey is bumpy, long and bleak But I will go on: I have promises to keep The mountains are scary, dangerous and steep But I am carrying on: I have promises to keep Life is a heap of desires and challenges But I have decided to carry on I have promises to keep I have miles to go I have miles to go I have decided to go on I have promises to keep I have promises to keep Yes, I have promises to keep Don’t you see No matter how hard life is I am determined to carry on For I have promises to keep! Our Lyrics:Song #8: I Have Promises to Keep

6. Our Teaching Resources Package

7. How to Use the Poetic Collocation Dictionary in Your Teaching? • ‘Collocation’ refers to the natural phenomenon that certain words always go together in people’s idiomatic usage of a language • For instance, we tend to say ‘to ride a bicycle’ but not ‘to take a bicycle’ • One important task in English language teaching is to help students become aware of the relationships of words • For instance, to know which adjectives are usually used to describe which nouns, or which verbs can be used with which nouns to form verb phrases

8. Poets and Lyrics Writers • Poets and lyrics writers can be said to be creative specialists in the practice of collocation. They usually stretch the limits of language to create interesting, unexpected collocations of words which are, however, still permissible in the idiomatic usage of the language • If poets just stick to common collocations of their language, their poems and lyrics will become a bit too boring and expected, bordering on the cliché • Poets and lyrics writers can thus be said to be creative innovators of language conventions: they renew our language practices to give us beautiful surprises, which are yet still within the permissible boundaries of our language conventions

9. Simple Class Activity Teachers can conduct a simple classroom activity on what words or adjectives usually go with the word “smiles”, using the following teaching steps: • Write the word ‘smile’ on the blackboard and ask students to think of different adjectives that can go with the word ‘smile’. You can give one or two examples first: e.g., ‘sunny smiles’, ‘happy smile’ • Elicit more examples from the students and put their examples in a table on the blackboard

10. Then ask students to read or listen to the excerpts of poem/lyrics lines that you can find in this poetic Collocation Dictionary (e.g., under the key word ‘smile’) and ask them to underline (or note down) all the adjectives (or combinations of words) that they think the poets have used to describe smiles in their poems or lyrics Table 1: Table for brainstorming with students: What adjectives usually go with the noun ‘smile’ Simple Class Activity

11. Ask students to use these examples to complete and expand the table that they have started with in their brainstorming session. Ask them to choose those lines (or combination of words) that they like the best and discuss (in pairs or groups) why they like them (e.g., non-cliché, unexpected combination of words, beautiful imagery, etc.; teachers can lead the discussion by giving some examples first). Table 2: Table for students to note down poetic collocations from the poem/lyrics lines Simple Class Activity

12. For extended, free practice, students can be asked (e.g., as take-home activities) to construct some simple sentences (e.g., lyrical lines) about smiles using the new words in the table (individually, in pairs or in groups). Simple Class Activity

13. Simple Class Activity • Teachers can then encourage students to use these newly-learnt phrases in their future writing (e.g., simple song lyrics, poems, or prose) • You can extend this classroom activity into a long-term, self-learning activity by having a class competition on writing the best collocation dictionaries • Students can be asked to collate their own partial collocation dictionaries on selected key words (e.g., love, dream, rain, angel) over a period of time

14. Simple Class Activity • The best entries (in the format of tables or entries like those you can find in this Collocation Dictionary) will be selected as winners in the competition • In this way students are encouraged to be autonomous learners and gradually increase their awareness of collocation between different words • They can also gradually develop a sense of ownership of the English language and take pride in their own self-learning activities

15. Simple Class Activity • The above suggested activity is just an example to show how the present poetic Collocation Dictionary can serve both as teaching resources and as a model for students to create their own small-scale, partial Collocation Dictionaries • Teachers are encouraged to modify the above teaching procedures and adapt and transform the above activity into different variant activities to suit the particular needs, interests and proficiency levels of their own classes of students

16. The woods are lonely, dark and deep But I have to go on: I have promises to keep The journey is bumpy, long and bleak But I will go on: I have promises to keep The mountains are scary, dangerous and steep But I am carrying on: I have promises to keep Life is a heap of desires and challenges But I have decided to carry on I have promises to keep I have miles to go I have miles to go I have decided to go on I have promises to keep I have promises to keep Yes, I have promises to keep Don’t you see No matter how hard life is I am determined to carry on For I have promises to keep! Our Lyrics:Song #8: I Have Promises to Keep

17. To learn more about collocation and related dictionaries, you can visit the following link hosted by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University: http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/advdicts/collocation.htm There are many other useful resources available on the Internet. The last section of our poetic Collocation Dictionary shows some useful web links that you can visit to access the rich corpora of poems, lyrics and quotes by poets and lyrics writers in the world Useful Online Resources

18. How to Use the Rhyming Dictionary in Your Teaching • Rhyming is perhaps the most ancient and universal poetic and musical technique found in many cultures and literary traditions • Rhyming has many functions • For instance, it helps the audience to easily pick up the structure of the poem, lyrics or everyday idioms. • Our students will quickly remember a witty saying or idiom with elements that rhyme, such as: An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

19. The Power of Rhyming Or: A house is made of walls and beams; A home is made of love and dreams. Or: Shakespeare’s famous lines in his play, A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. • There are different terms used to analyse the prosodic techniques that contribute to the euphony (i.e., sweet, musical harmony; ‘eu’ means ‘sweet’; ‘phony’ means ‘voice’ or ‘sound’) of a poetic or lyrical piece

20. Commonly Mentioned Terms • Assonance:repetition of vowels without repetition of consonants as in ‘stony and holy’, a technique used as an alternative to rhyme • Rhyme: repetition of sounds at the end of the rhyming words (as in the examples given earlier) • Consonance: repetition of consonant sounds in a short sequence of words, for example, the ‘t’ sound in ‘Is it blunt and flat?’ • Alliteration: a prosodic technique in which successive words (more strictly, stressed syllables) begin with the same consonant sound (e.g., ‘safe and sound’, ‘cheap and cheerful’, ‘without rhyme or reason’)

21. Strategy of Phonetic Parallelism • In Rap lyrics, as in other forms of spoken and written poetry, many of the above prosodic techniques are used to create a harmonious, musical effect • In the initial stage of teaching students prosodic techniques the teacher might not want to burden their students with all these different terms • One simple strategy to teach these techniques is to group them under the umbrella term: parallelism, and in this case the prosodic techniques can all be called examples of phonetic parallelism (teachers can use the simpler term, repetition of sounds, when they teach beginning students)

22. Phonograms • The examples collected in the present Rhyming Dictionary are called ‘phonograms’ • They are exact rhymes. That means the ends of the words sound exactly the same, and as phonograms, the ending parts of the rhyming words are also spelt in the same way: e.g., mind, blind • However, teachers can also introduce half-rhymes or near-rhymes (similar to examples of assonance discussed above) to broaden the pool of rhyming words that students can use when writing lyrics • e.g., home, alone

23. Phonograms • The examples of phonograms and suffixes (which form a subcategory of phonograms) included in the present Rhyming Dictionary are by no means exhaustive, and the teacher is encouraged to expand and enrich the present dictionary in a collaborative project with their students • For instance, the teacher can organize a class competition on compiling rhyming dictionaries. Students can be asked to compile (individually, in pairs or in groups) their own partial rhyming dictionaries on selected key endings of words (e.g., -ind: mind, kind, find, blind)

24. Class Competition on Compiling Rhyming Dictionaries • The teacher can follow the following simple teaching steps to get students started: • Select a song that contains rhyming words that will be easy for your students (e.g., Song #8: I Have Promises to Keep) • Let students listen to the song and enjoy the melody of the song first. Then on a second listening you can provide the students with the lyrics • For higher proficiency students, you can prepare a listening cloze, leaving out the key rhyming words in the lyrics and getting students to fill in the blanks: e.g., keep, deep, bleak, steep, heap • For less proficient students, you can provide the words as options for students to select for each blank; or you can ask students to underline words that sound similar/that rhyme.

25. Then you can get students to fill in a table with the rhyming words Table : Finding the Rhyming Words in the Song: I Have Promises to Keep Under the teacher’s guidance, the table can then be further expanded and enriched by students themselves (using words that they have found from other songs or sources) to form the starting entry of their own rhyming dictionary Class Competition on Compiling Rhyming Dictionaries

26. Class Competition on Compiling Rhyming Dictionaries Table: Expanding the Table of Rhyming Words to Make an Entry in their Own Rhyming Dictionary (Teacher can consult the present Rhyming Dictionary to provide students with some examples)

27. Uses of the Rhyming Dictionary • In this way students are encouraged to pay attention to word sounds, word endings and word spellings. Gradually they will increase their awareness of the different ways in which words can rhyme (or different kinds of repetition of sounds in words) • They can also gradually develop a sense of ownership of the English language and take pride in their own self-learning activities; e.g., they can feel proud about their own ability to create a rhyming dictionary for use by other students and teachers • The present Rhyming Dictionary can thus serve as both a teaching resource (e.g., when helping students to rewrite or extend some song lyrics) and as a model to show students how they can create and compile their own rhyming dictionaries for use in their own future writing

28. Useful Websites • Websites where you can find more information about the above-mentioned prosodic techniques used in poetry and lyrics writing: • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assonance • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonance • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration

29. How to Use the Teaching Notes and Lesson Plans • In this Teaching Notes booklet, teachers will find teaching ideas and a sample lesson plan for each of the songs in the Songs CD provided in the ELT Rap Teaching Resources Package • However, these ideas and lesson plans are only there to stimulate teachers’ thinking about how they can use their songs most fruitfully for their students • Teachers are encouraged to mix and match or adapt the ideas and teaching steps proposed in this booklet according to the particular needs, interests and proficiency levels of their own students

30. Example: Rap the Tenses • We hope that teachers enjoy using ELT rap with the students, and bring the joy and fun of rap into the English lessons as well as the English extra-curricular activities • For example, let’s first listen to the song: Rap the Tenses, and then see the teaching notes and sample lesson plan designed for the Song in the Teaching Notes Package • Song #2. Rap the Tenses Teaching Notes • There are some more stanzas that teachers can use with their students to extend this song

31. V Run ran run Run ran run Jump jumped jumped Jump jumped jumped Help helped helped Hahaha! From the Titanic, ‘You jump, I jump!’ Everybody jumps! Tenses are easy Nobody panics! VI Sleep slept slept Sleep slept slept Lay laid laid Lay laid laid It’s already late! Let’s call it a day! Song #2. Rap the Tenses

32. Rap the Tenses • It’s a fun rap to practise the tenses, especially the tenses of common irregular verbs. Teachers can work with students to cover more verbs and to design fun, rhyming lines to end each stanza • For example: • From the Titanic, ‘You jump, I jump!’  From _________

33. Sample Lesson Plan • Target: Senior Primary / Junior Secondary • Theme: Tenses • Duration: 60-min • Language Focus: • Spelling different tense forms of verbs • Language Items: • Irregular verbs • Rhyming words, i.e. Steal stole stolen. Oh, my head is so swollen!

35. Irregular Verb Quiz Simple Present Simple Past Past Participle Do Did Donr Go Take Make Win Lie Steal Keep Sing Sink Write down as many other irregular verbs within the given time