In my last posting I gave alist of 10 songs containing either ‘going to’ or gonna or both. In this posting, I am going to show you howI found them.

In the old days, if you had wanted to find 10 songs each containing a piece of target language, you would have had to do one of the following:

• Keep a notebook and make a note of the songs as and when you think of them/hear them.
• Go through your entire collection of records or CDs reading the back cover of each one and scanning for examples of ‘going to’ or ‘gonna’.
• Spend the day in a record shop.
• Have a brain storming session with some friends, asking them how many songs containing the structure or item in question they can think of.

Now imagine you were able to come up with 10 songs, your next step would be to get copies of them. This would be expensive or time-consuming.

Fortunately, technology makes things easier for us. In August, 2006, YouTube announced its plan to offer “every music video ever created“. I don’t know if such a dream can ever be made possible but there is no music video that I have been unable to find on the site so far.

YouTube can be regarded as a huge repository of music for the classroom (forget the element of video for a moment). Online access means no more running around looking for cassettes or CDs for song-based activities.

And importantly, the search facility on YouTube allows us to use the repository to find exactly what we are looking for. In other words, YouTube is a learner-friendly corpus.

Here is how to do it:

1. Go to YouTube

2. Click on ‘advanced search‘ and you will see this page:

3. There are 4 search windows on the left hand side. If you want to find songs containing a specific word (gonna, for example), type that word into the top search window. If you want to find a phrase (’going to’, for example), type it into the next one down.

4. On the right hand side of the page, select the ’specific categories’ option and you will be given a drop-down menu. From this, click on the box that says ‘music’.

5. Click on ’search’ and you will be able to browse all of the songs that are found.

Here are a few song lyrics containing specific target language that I found using this technique:

Used to

• This used to be my playground
  
• I’m not the man I used to be
• I used to love her but it’s all over now
• A pain that I’m used to
• I can’t get used to losing you

Ain’t

• It ain’t over ’til it’s over
• Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone
• He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
• It ain’t necessarily so
• Ain’t nobody’s business if I do

The present perfect continuous*

• I’ve been loving you too long to stop now
• I’ve been thinking about you
• The piano has been drinking, not me
• I’ve been waiting for a girl like you to come into my life

(* To find songs with present perfect continuous structures, I typed the word ‘been’ into the search window.)