The Top 5 Taylor Swift Songs to Teach Students English Tenses Better
Songs are highly creative and engaging activities to use in a clasroom atmosphere, especially while teaching grammar. Since our first years of being students and becoming a language teachers, tenses have seemed quite boring, so here are the top 5 songs to convey grammatical rules in an enjoyable way.
First, let’s start by enlighting the choice of Taylor Swift. Actually, it’s not hard to predict; she is loved by late young learners who just started understanding both abstract terms like grammar and the concept of love. (Btw, yes, I do love Taylor Swift just like them.)
1: Present Continuous Tense
- I’m doing better than I ever was
- Walkin’ with his head down, I’m the one he’s walkin’ to
- All the drama queens taking swings
All the jokers dressin’ up as kings
In a brief way, we use the present continuous while describing actions that are happening right now. For “Call You What You What” from the “Reputation” album, the tense is visible and could be used. (The initials of the song can also be used for teaching past tenses.)
2: Present Perfect Tense
- All of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room
The Present perfect tense is used to express when an action happened in the past but it’s influence still remains. In “Anti Hero” from the “Midnights” album, you can also find other tenses, just like in her other songs. (Her songs were the best source while designing lesson plans when I was a junior at my college.)
3: Past Continuous Tense
- I underestimated just who I was dealing with
She had to know the pain was beating on me like a drum
She underestimated just who she was stealing from
We use past continuous to talk about the past for something that happened before and also after another action, for something that repeats in the past or at a spesific time. In the latest album by Taylor Swift, “Better Than Revenge” is another good example to demonstrate this tense.
4: Past Perfect Continuous Tense
- Flew me to places I’d never been
’Til you put me down,
It is used to describe an action that happened before an event that occurred in the past; moreover, it should have happened at a certain time, and the process in which the action took place is described in the sentence.
5: Present Perfect Continuous Tense
- I’ve been spending the last eight months
Thinking all love ever does
Present perfect continuous is used for an action that started in the past and still continues. The mentioned activities may continue in the future. “Begin Again” from the “Red” album is obviously not todays song, but still serves education just like her other songs.
