One of the hardest elements of learning English in London is getting rid of, or at least softening, your accent and I like to focus on this in my Advanced classes. One of the ways students can do this is by noticing that small words , like prepositions and auxiliaries receive no emphasis and are almost ,’Eaten,’ in natural speech. In my English classes in Shepherd’s Bush, I sometimes ask students to notice how this happens in songs and in one such lesson this week , we had one of those moments that make this job so brilliant.

The song I chose to use was ,’One day like this,’ by Elbow. I’ve always liked the band; they’re the typical sort of combo that I love: grumpy (but only because they’re brokenhearted!) men from the North of England with guitars and a good ear for a tune. Another reason I’m a fan is the fact that although they have never been particularly successful or made much money, they STILL refused to accept a pile of cash to let a bread company use this song in a television ad. How refreshing in an age where ex-heroes like Ringo Starr and Iggy Pop are flogging insurance! When Elbow won the Mercury prize last year, the assembled rock fraternity, a usually notoriously cliquey and snide bunch, rose as one to applaud them. There was a lot of love in the room for Elbow.

Back in our classroom; After we’d gone through the lyrics, isolated the vocab and predicted which words would be pronounced with emphasis and which would not, we turned off the light and drew the blinds. Then, as we all giggled at the strangeness of being in class, but in darkness, I pressed play….

The song is one of those instant classics that just makes you happy to listen to it and it has an amazing singout finish (Like in Hey Jude) repeating the same lines over and over again.

“Throw those curtains wide

One day like this a year’d see me right.”

As this life-affirming message swirled around the class, we very slowly raised the blinds, thus allowing an almost divine wave of pale winter sunshine to fill the room. Everyone’s faces broke into big silly smiles, the bell rang and although the magic had only lasted a few seconds, we had all felt it, though it was impossible to explain. Ok, it was corny, ok, it was cheesy and ok, it was sad drama-queenery of the most vain and self-indulgent kind. It was also great, though.

Mike

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Industry news, The English Studio news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.