The value of song lyrics for teaching and learning English phrasal verbs: a corpus investigation of four music genres

ABSTRACT

Phrasal verbs are a notoriously difficult feature of English for most second language and foreign language learners to master. Different sources, such as movies, music, games and books, can provide learners with exposure to the most common phrasal verbs in English. This study aims to investigate the degree to which music can play a role in exposing learners to phrasal verbs through analyzing their frequency in song lyrics from different genres (i.e., Pop, Rock, Hip-hop and Metal). For this purpose, a corpus of 400 song lyrics by different artists from these four genres was searched for all existing phrasal verbs. The resulting list of phrasal verbs was compared to Garnier and Schmitt’s (2014) Phrasal Verb Pedagogical List in order to determine their value for learners. Further comparisons were subsequently drawn to determine which genre could be of greater use to language learning and instruction. The results revealed that song lyrics can potentially be a beneficial source for learning these constructions. Differences in the type and token frequency of phrasal verb among the four genres can also be used to determine the usefulness of each genre to students from various levels of proficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Phrasal verbs
• incidental learning
• self-access materials
• music
• song lyrics

Notes on contributors

Maryam Akbary holds an MA in applied linguistics from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.

Hesamoddin Shahriari is an assistant professor of applied linguistics at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on academic writing. His research interests include second language writing, academic English and corpus linguistics.

Azar Hosseini Fatemi is an associate professor of applied linguistics at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.

ORCiD

Maryam Akbary http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8903-0633

Hesamoddin Shahriari http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5465-8153