Action research into the use of popular music: A goldmine worth exploring in the ELT secondary-school classroom?

Abstract

Abstract Conducting action research is an excellent way for teachers and teacher trainers to pursue their professional development inside the classroom and for language learners to take part in small-scale research projects. This article presents a study where action research was used in the teaching and learning of English in a Norwegian upper-secondary school. A class of thirty, first-year Vg1 pupils took part in a project to investigate either lexico-grammatical or multimodal features in a selection of popular music while working towards achieving some of the competence aims in the English subject curriculum. The project involved dividing the learners into two groups each of which followed a different approach to investigating the lyrics and, in the case of one group, also the videos. The same written assignment was given to both groups to see if similar or diverging results emerged that might be related to the different approaches used. The learners were also given a pre-project and a post-project questionnaire to probe their thoughts and reactions to the learning process. Both approaches made use of music performances on YouTube; these represent a rich, multimodal language resource appreciated by adolescents but tending to be underexploited by English language teachers. Besides presenting the actual study, this article is intended as a step-by-step guide for teachers who would like to implement similar action in their own classrooms.