Find Me a Song and Add the Blanks: Supporting Teachers to Retrieve Lyrics to English Listening Lessons

English learning comprises the development of four abilities: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Commonly, English teachers use songs to develop students' listening because it provides a fun approach for improving vocabulary and perceiving different accents. However, every time a teacher needs to prepare a listening lesson using songs, s/he needs to search for songs that contain the words that are being studied in that lesson, and also download and edit the lyrics, substituting the words by blank spaces to be filled by the students while they listen to the music. This paper presents the application of Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to index and retrieve songs according to a set of intended words, besides a module that prepares the songs for listening lessons, substituting the terms by blank spaces. Results reveal that the tool is well-succeeded to provide the aforementioned functionalities. Moreover, a teacher used the tool in the context of her English class, approving the solution provided and contributing to reduce the effort for preparing a pedagogical activity for a listening lesson.

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