Page-1 (Load of English Song)

Page-3(Load Of English Song)

009a, 2009b) also found differences among different ‘genres’ of TV programmes and

movies. This suggests that different text types need to be studied separately. One

spoken text type that remains under-investigated is song lyrics. Few studies prior to the

present study investigated the vocabulary of songs (Murphey & Alber, 1985; Murphey,

1990; Murphey, 1992; Meara, 1993), which is rather surprising given the popularity of

English songs with language learners inside and outside the classroom. These studies

were indicative of a smaller vocabulary load of English song lyrics in comparison to

other authentic spoken text types, which renders them particularly suitable for use with

lower level learners. However, it is hard to draw any strong conclusions from this

research as the evidence is either indirect (Murphey & Alber, 1985; Murphey, 1990;

Murphey, 1992) or based on too small a sample (Meara, 1993). The present study will

address this gap by using a larger data sample than was used previously.

Songs in SL Learning

A number of studies on second language learners have shown songs to be effective in

learning vocabulary (Coyle & Gόmez Gracia, 2014; Rukholm, 2011; Salcedo, 2010;

Alipour et.al., 2012; Medina, 1990; Hahn, 1972). Songs have several advantages over

other authentic spoken texts that would be facilitative of vocabulary learning. One of

these relates to the number of repetitions. It is well established in Second Language

Vocabulary Acquisition Literature that repeated encounters with words generally lead

to better learning (e.g. Webb, 2007; Chen & Truscott, 2010). In addition to natural

repetitions that occur in texts, songs offer additional repetitions through the choruses

which are repeated several times in a given song. Murphey (1992) analysed the

discourse properties of 50 pop songs and found that words were repeated three times on

average in a given song, which suggests that pop songs are quite repetitive. Another

way that songs increase repetitions is through repeated listening. Repeated listening to

the same song is quite normal and rather preferable in contrast to other spoken texts

whereas seeing the same movie or the same episode of a TV series more than once is

rather boring. Thus, songs increase the number of encounters with words in a natural