Teaching grammar through pop culture: A case study using lyrics

This contribution highlights the potential of pop culture texts for introducing and illustrating grammar in foreign language education. It starts from the premises (1) that grammar instruction should take place in a contextualized fashion, (2) that features of conversational grammar are commonly underrepresented, and, on a related note, (3) that there is a gap between what learners of foreign languages are taught and what they actually need when they are in contact with a foreign language. It is suggested that using pop culture materials present a viable option to achieve meaningful contextualization and to address most issues of conversational grammar as well as to better take account of the relevance of the educational materials for the learners. To this end, a corpus of c. 550,000 words of English pop lyrics, a genre regularly labelled “conversational”, is analyzed to assess whether conversational grammar is teachable with such an approach. Results suggest that this is well possible, while it also emerges that other crucial features of conversation (such as discourse markers) are largely absent from pop lyrics, so that they do not serve as a silver bullet and other (pop culture) genres may be more appropriate in this regard. However, as pop lyrics (like conversation) contain both standard and non-standard variants, it is argued that using such material allows educators to address grammatical issues with authentic texts. It also opens up additional foreign language learning opportunities beyond structural concerns, for instance as regards broader grammar-related issues such as register (what is stylistically appropriate in which context?) and sociolinguistic concerns such as language awareness (what counts as a norm? how can we deal with variation?).