I love using songs in my lessons and I found out that my students enjoy it too! Apparently some of them even buy some of the songs! When we listen to a song in class, we listen to it several times in the week at the start of each Spanish lesson. My students know they have to take out the lyrics (in Spanish with the English next to it), to listen to song and to follow the lyrics at the same time. The following week, I usually give my students a quiz with gaps to fill in. It is a good listening task and by listening to the same song over and over again, not only they acquire new vocabulary and structures, they also get a good intonation and pronunciation.

This song “Sheila Down” is perfect to practice, review and/or reinforce the imperfect tense. The singer, Sheila Blanco pronounces the lyrics very clearly and the story is great for teenagers. It leads to many questions about the woman in the song: what happened to her? Why was she killed in the shower? Who was her boyfriend?…I also make my students highlight the verbs in the preterite and in the imperfect tense and this leads to understand when we use those two different tenses in the past. Here is the song:

And here are the lyrics to download: sheila.down
And here is the quiz:sheila.down.quiz