Music In the Classroom. Bob Dylan Printable Lesson Plan

Motivation is a key concept in learning foreign languages. My motivation as a language learner was, and still is, music and literature, which I desperately wanted to be able to understand in the language in which they were written. When the time came to choose my dissertation topic for my MSc it was clear to me that music in ESL classrooms should be my focus. The bibliography was almost as sparse as my mood was rotten while I wrote it. No one wants their student years to be over and relocating back to my home country was not a prospect I was looking forward to. Poring over hundreds of song lyrics in order to find appropriate songs, my conviction that music promotes language acquisition became stronger and remains with me today.

Noam Chomsky on Standardized Testing and the Creation of the Economic Man.

When Chomsky speaks, we, teachers and parents, must listen carefully.

… the recent years there is a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers. So they have to teach the test and the test determines what happens to the child and what happens to the teacher. That’s guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process. It means that the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual student needs, the student can’t pursue things the student might be interested in, because you got to memorise something for this test tomorrow and the teacher’s future depends on it as well as the student’s. These are all ways… well there are people that sit at their offices, the bureaucrats and design this, like you say they are not evil people, but they are working within a system of ideology and doctrines which turns what they are doing in to something extremely harmful.