It’s that time of the year again for the ‘Boom bang a bang’ jamboree that is the Eurovision song contest! It is an event that lends itself to exploitation in the classroom in a number of ways, so here are a few ideas:
- Pupils could consider what constitutes ‘Europe’ and think about the differences between the geographical (or indeed historical) concept of Europe compared to membership of the European Union and the European broadcasting union. Pupils could be given a list of countries in the language they are learning and match them to the English (or simply work out what the English is)/plot where the countries are on a map and/or create a venn diagram showing how the various countries relate to the different concepts of ‘Europe’.
- Pupils could practise their reading skills and using numbers in the target language by doing a quiz on Eurovision facts and figures. The example in this presentation is in French but could be easily adapted to other languages.
- Pupils could listen to short extracts from some of the songs and have a Group Talk type discussion about the songs/music/video they like and why. The Eurovision site has links to all the songs, including videos.
Those are ideas for activities that could be used year after year at Eurovision song contest time. Then of course, there are the songs themselves. Increasingly there are fewer and fewer entries where the contestants are singing in their own language (or at least in the languages most commonly taught in the UK classroom). A cursory glance through this year’s songs reveal that the Belgian, German, Austrian and Swiss entries are all sung in English.
Thankfully France has bucked the trend with a cracking upbeat number from the group Twin Twin entitled Moustache. On the Eurovision site you can see the wonderfully retro looking video which the group has created; this takes the form of a game show in which the contestant really wants to win a moustache! It has already proved to be a bit controversial with the accusation that the group has plaigerised the song Papaoutai by Stromae
On the face of it the desire for a moustache might seem very bizarre but actually the song is satirising modern values which puts material things above some of the more simple things in life. So some ideas to exploit the song and its accompanying video:
- Comprehension work on the lyrics – what words do pupils already know, what can they work out from the context and other clues etc. The lyrics are actually fairly straightforward and can be found on the Eurovision site here.
- Using the lyrics to do some grammar work, especially the use of the present tense.
- Taking screenshots of the video to describe appearance – there are some pretty wacky hairstyles!
- Using the lyrics to get pupils to think about their values in life and what other simple things someone might wish for, such as love, friends, happiness or health. Pupils could be given a list of things to rank in order of importance and say why. They could also be shown pictures of people in different situations; they have to imagine what these people would say that they would wish for.
Finally, for pupils learning Spanish there is Ruth Lorenzo’s Dancing in the Rain which uses a mix of Spanish and English – the lyrics can be found in a link from here.
