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Rock Talk. Using hit songs In the ESL Classroom.

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What is Rock Talk?

Rock Talk uses internationally-known top pop hits plus phonics to help ESL students reduce their accents and gain fluency in English. According to Steven Krashen’s Natural Approach, people learn better when they are relaxed. Music, as we all know, helps people relax. The result is that students are more able to absorb material because using music lowers their affective filter.

The recent brain research also supports the use of music. According to the research, when you engage students emotionally, material is more deeply embedded in the brain causing greater retention. We all know that music engages emotions, hence the effectiveness of RockTalk.

Rock Talk combines phonics with internationally-known pop music hits to help ESL students reduce their accents and gain fluency in English.

• Rock Talk dramatically relaxes students and opens the neural pathways for learning.
• Rock Talk facilitates the emotional brain connection that speeds and deepens the learning process.
• Internationally-known pop music hits are familiar to students, which increases their comfort level and makes repititions easy—”the drill without the kill.”

Field tested for over 3 years, with over 50,000 users

How does Rock Talk work?

Rock Talk uses pop music because the songs are structurally ideal for the repetition of relevant material while still being able to hold the student’s attention. To put it differently, it’s the “drill” without the “kill.”

Each lesson is structured with an icebreaker (to warm students up), followed by a medley of two or three top pop hits which contain the relevant vowel sound or consonant blend. The medley is also built around a “theme” for the chapter and forms the chapter’s content. These medleys are not sound-a-likes.

Arrangements are carefully constructed to a beat from Gary Glitter’s song, “Rock ‘N Roll,” in such a way that students can’t escape from the “groove.” The singing involves unusually long phrasing. In this way, if students breathe when the singer breathes, they learn to rest on the vowel when they speak English. In other words, students are “tricked into” fluency painlessly and easily.

Also included in each chapter are grammar exercises based on the embedded grammar structures found in the songs, as well as appropriate vocabulary and cloze exercises. Each chapter ends with a discussion of the chapter’s theme (which facilitates the acculturation process), followed by role play exercises based on the plots of the songs, and culminating in a writing assignment. Each exercise is keyed as to level so that Rock Talk can be used as a supplemental tool in a multi-level setting.

How did Rock Talk evolve?

Jenny Redding, creator of Rock Talk, began using music in her own second language acquisition process with Spanish. It therefore came naturally to her to use this approach with her ESL students when she began teaching in 1982. Then, while taking TESOL courses at UCLA to earn her TESOL Certificate, her classmates kept requesting her musical lesson plans. It was at that moment that Rock Talk was born.

Jenny honed the technique, field-testing a variety of lessons from 1994 to 1997 on hundreds of ESL students from all over the world. Jenny was a “freeway flyer” at the time, and taught at Glendale Community College, where the ESL demographic is mostly Middle Eastern students, as well as teaching at Pasadena Community College, where the demographic is primarily Asian, and finally teaching at Oxnard College, where the demographic is primarily Latino.

Rock Talk and the Consonant Blends

Inter.Adv./ Secondary & Adult

Hitting the top of the billboard once again, this musical, entertaining book has students craving consonants! It is formatted like the original Rock Talk book, only with a focus on phonemes involving various consonant combinations.

The 10 chapters focus on the “sh” versus “ch” sound, the “s” consonant, the stops (“p,” “t,” “k,” “b,” “d,” and “g”), voiced and unvoiced “th,” the “z” sound, “s-clusters” (“sh,” “sp,” “sn,” “spl” and “spr”), short and long “oo,” diphthongs, and more. Tongue Twisters are a fun addition to this book as well! Whether it’s the “I Love ESL” version of “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” or the real “Twist and Shout,” this is a whole to way to “rock the talk.”

Rock Talk Rules: The Vowels

Beg./Middle School, Adults

Like the other famous books in the Rock Talk series, this title uses hit songs from the past 20 years—now in lessons that focus on basic parts of speech and verb tenses! The chapters are organized phonetically and include songs such as “Monster Mash,” “Chicken Lips and Lizard Hips,” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” The humor and upbeat tempos create a “rulin” combination for enhancing language acquisition.

Rock Talk and the Vowel Sounds

Inter.Adv./ Secondary & Adult

Loosen your lips and move your hips to this sensational new breakthrough in language acquisition! Using pop/rock hits from the past 20 years, this imaginative and entertaining program implants melodies and words into students’ brains, strengthening their unconscious assimilation of English intonation, rhythm, and grammatical structures.

From “Every Breath You Take” to “Help Me Rhonda” and the “Do Wah Dittie,” songs are the captivating center of these 10 vowel-focused lessons! Each lesson is divided into 7 groovy exercises, with hilarious titles like “Hammer the Grammar,” “What Does It Mean, Jelly Bean?” and “Hunky Dory—Finish the Story.” This is the ultimate musical language experience—sure to top the charts!

Rock Talk By Request

Inter.Adv./ Secondary & Adult

Now you “Can’t Get It Out Of [Your] Head” with Rock Talk By Request’s renditions of such hits as “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne, “Toxic” by Britney Spears, recent recuts of “Big Yellow Taxi” by Counting Crowes and “Drift Away” by Uncle Kracker, as well as “Steve McQueen” by Sheryl Crow, and “Get This Party Started” by Pink, to name a few. Learn To Listen and Fill In What’s Missin’ exercises keep phonics at the forefront.  Much of the original Rock Talk format remains intact but there are great new chapter sections such as “Read, Read, Yes, Indeed” (sample student essays for reading), “Supersonic Rockin’ Phonics” (phonics raps), “Easy Does It . . . Let’s Discuss It” dialogues, and “Homework’s the Trick to Make It Stick!” (for homework and extended activities).