The lexical coverage of popular songs in English language teaching

Songs are popular among language learners and a text genre that is yet to be fully exploited in language teaching. Questions arise regarding their lexical demand and vocabulary-learning opportunities they afford. Two pop song corpora were analyzed to determine the vocabulary size necessary to comprehend 95% and 98% of words in pop songs. The first corpus comprised 408 songs listed in recent US billboard charts. The second corpus consisted of 635 songs selected by teachers for language-teaching purposes. Results of an analysis using RANGE and 20 BNC word-frequency lists showed that the lexical demand of charts songs is overall clearly lower compared to other written genres but similar to spoken genres, as the most frequent 3000 word families plus proper nouns provided 95.1% coverage of tokens, and knowledge of 6000 word families plus proper nouns was necessary to reach 98.2% coverage. Teacher-selected songs have a lower lexical demand: Knowledge of the most frequent 2000 word families plus proper nouns was necessary to reach 95.5% coverage, while a vocabulary size of 4000 word families plus proper nouns provided coverage of 98.2% of words in the pedagogical corpus. Implications for the use of songs in ESL and EFL classrooms are discussed.