Exploratory Practice: Researching the Impact of Songs on EFL Learners' Verbal Memory

Traditionally popular songs have been used as a way of enhancing listening and auditory

perception skills and teaching vocabulary, but not necessarily for memory recall. Popular

song gap-fills are already commonplace within the EFL (English as a foreign language) field;

however, this study found that more attention needs to be given, to the lexical, grammatical

and phonological items that learners are instructed to retain. The results of this study

suggest that, verbal memory is a vital part of language learning that should be incorporated

into popular song gap-fills and that EFL teachers, theorists and textbook authors need to

review the way language in popular songs is encoded, stored and retrieved, by incorporating

memory strategies, following guidelines on gap-selection, including a phonological aspect

and using a recycling activity. In this article traditional and contemporary understandings of

verbal memory and popular song are outlined and comprehensively analysed within relevant

fields that embrace ELT (English language teaching), Biology, Psycholinguistics,

Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Psychology perspectives and discusses their pedagogical

implications.