Episode Description
The most recent episode of the podcast featured the song, “Adventurous Girl,” which was written and sung by our friend and fellow language teacher, Patti Spinner. We were so excited to meet someone who loves using music to teach and learn language as much as we do - some people might even say more! We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to Patti and ask her about her experience as a teacher and singer/grammar songwriter!
In this special Connections Episode, we would like to share our interview with Patti Spinner. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Episode Transcript
<intro>
E: Hi! I’m Ece.
H: And I’m Heather.
E: We’re the hosts of the podcast, English as a Singing Language.
H: We choose a variety of different songs from different time periods and different artists.
E: Then, we talk about the interesting and useful language features in the song.
H: And then we sing! That’s my favorite part!
E: Me too!
H: So, Ece what song are we featuring in this episode?
E: Actually, Heather, this is one of our “Connections Episodes.”
H: Really? That’s great! We did a Connections Episode in Season One, too.
E: Yes. We dedicated an episode and the song K'naan's Waving Flag, to our colleague and friend Fatma Dodurka and her daughter Alara.
H: We were working with them on an inspiring project called, Be the Voice of Girls.
E: You can go back and listen to that episode if you are interested in finding out more about Fatma and her work in Hatay, Turkiye.
H: We have gotten to meet so many inspiring people just by doing this podcast.
E: We sure have. In this bonus interview, we talked to our friend Patti Spinner.
H: Ece, you and I love using music to teach and learn languages, but Patti actually writes and records songs for English language learners.
E: That’s so amazing. You can check out Season 2, Episode 7 of the podcast to hear us discuss one of Patti’s songs.
H: That’s right! I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about learning and teaching English with music.
E: Me neither. Let’s get started!
<end intro>
H: Hi Patti! Welcome to our Connections Episode of “English as a Singing Language.” We were so impressed with your ability to write and sing songs that focus on English grammar, we couldn’t wait to talk to you!
E: That’s right! Thank you so much for joining us. Maybe you could just start by introducing yourself.
P: Yeah, my name is Patty Spinner and I’m at the English as a Second Language program at Michigan State University and I’m very happy to be here because I love your podcast.
H: We’re so happy, too. Can you tell us a little bit about your teaching background?
P: Well, I actually started teaching English when I was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, and as I recall at the time, I really wanted to teach the grammar courses. Those were my favorites, and everyone else was happy to let me teach those because most people didn’t like grammar as much as I did.
E: Heather and I both understand your love of teaching grammar!
H: Definitely! We both enjoy teaching, learning and singing about grammar! What other teaching experience do you have? What have you done since you finished graduate school?
P: And then, since then I have taught lots of different groups. I’ve worked with four-year-olds in a daycare. I’ve worked with displaced people, refugees from Afghanistan and Syria. I’ve taught university learners, and people who wanted to learn business English, so lots of different things which is always fun for me, too.
E: Wow! You have a lot of experience as an ESL teacher. And, I think I can speak for both Heather and myself when I say that grammar is really fun to teach.
H: English grammar can be pretty crazy, but it is always interesting to talk about!
E: So how did you get into writing songs about grammar? That must have been an interesting journey.
P: Well, I’ve always been interested in music I taught myself to play guitar, and I like to sing, and when I was teaching in the English Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, we started a choir, so we had a group of students who liked to sing, and we performed at graduation and little things it wasn’t very big, but we had a good time and then I got the idea to put my two, you know, English interests together so grammar and music.
H: Ece, are you thinking what I’m thinking?
E: That we need to start a choir for English learners, so that we can all sing together?
H: You read my mind. That sounds like so much fun. But, sorry Patti, back to your story. What happened after that?
P: And at the time, I wrote some lessons for the Betty Azar Grammar series, mostly songs by the Beatles, I think. They were little lessons that went with those songs, but I knew I wanted to do my own songs for a couple of reasons because well one, as you probably know, there are copyright issues with existing songs, so there was a limit to what I could do with songs that other people had written, and performed.
E: There’s definitely a limit to what you can do with other people’s songs. That’s very true.
H: But writing lessons for Betty Azar had to be very exciting. She’s a grammar superhero.
E: Heather, you’re thinking about when you met her at the TESOL Convention, aren’t you?
H: I am. I still have the copy of the grammar book that she wrote. She signed a copy for me!!
E: Ok, Patti, what other benefits are there to writing your own songs when it comes to songs for English language learners?
P: Also, It was often hard to find songs that had a lot of good examples of the grammar that I wanted to teach, so we had students who were looking for songs with passive voice, for instance, and we could find a few examples, but you had to listen to a four-minute song to find two examples of passive, and it wasn’t really enough and sometimes you couldn’t really hear the lyrics very well and also sometimes the lyrics were not very appropriate for the classroom so that was another problem.
H: Those are both problems that we face when we’re trying to find songs to use for our podcast.
E: So, all in all, you wanted to avoid some of these issues, and create songs that were really focused on a specific grammar point.
P: So, I wanted to create my own songs that would solve some of those problems and also give lots of different kinds of examples so that the students could enjoy listening to the music, but also hear lots of different uses of tricky or difficult grammar points.
H: So, Patti, another thing Ece and I are very curious about, and I’m sure our listeners are, too, is what is your process for writing a grammar-focused song?
E: Yes. Which comes first, the grammar or the song?
P: So, you know writing songs can happen in a couple of different ways. Sometimes, I start with the music. I just have a little melody that I like and then I try to think of words that might sound good with it and then a grammar point that might fit those words, but other times I start with the grammar point. Like I knew I wanted to do a song for passive because I had students who were looking for a song like that so then I started with a passive a phrase like, a phrase that used passive, and then created music to go along with that, and I wanted to make sure that we had different tenses with the passive not just, you know, one use like with simple present, and I also wanted to make sure that there were some with a “by phrase” a prepositional phrase and some without. So, I wanted to make sure there were all those different examples so it can be hard to try to write a song that includes all of that stuff and still sounds like hopefully good music.
H: A-ha! So, that is how a song is written by you.
E: Heather, that’s not a very natural use of the passive voice.
H: You’re right. I can’t imagine trying to write song lyrics with natural-sounding grammar that are also fun to listen to and have a catchy melody.
E: Me neither. I guess, obviously Heather and I are big believers in using music to learn language. Would you mind sharing your views on how you think music helps us to learn language?
P: You know, I think there’s pretty good evidence that music can really help reinforce stress patterns in language to make them easier to produce naturally. The rhymes can also help with remembering certain phrases and vocabulary words, but for me, it mostly started with the idea of giving lots of good input, and lots of good chances to hear the language being produced in a natural way so it was very important to me that when I use a particular grammar structure that it’s used in a way that is normal the way that people really use it.
H: That’s really important.
E: I agree. What else do you think about when you’re writing a song?
P: So hopefully people will like the music enough that they’ll listen to it maybe more than one time and then you can start to remember those phrases and hopefully build on those as your language develops and you can remember just those particular phrases and how the grammar is used.
H: Patti, do you have any experience as a language learner using music to help you accomplish your language goals?
P: I know when I was learning languages that often helped me. I still remember phrases that I learned in Turkish songs, even though unfortunately, pretty much the rest of my Turkish ability is gone. I don’t remember much of anything, but I still remember a few words and phrases just because there were some songs that I really liked so hopefully, something like that will work with these songs.
E: I have Turkish kids songs stuck in my brain, too.
H: Same. I have Spanish pop songs from the 80’s that I can still sing along to.
E: Do you have any advice for our listeners who are learning English?
P: You know, my advice is probably the same advice they hear from everyone else and that’s to use it and you know get as much natural input as you can and to produce as much as you can for me though, it is important that it’s fun and that it’s something that you can do even when you’re relaxing like I always try to learn language while I’m watching shows, so I might watch a fun show that I like anyway, but I’ll watch it in German to help me practice and you know remember my German so I don’t lose it. And again, that’s why I think the music can be so helpful because I think if we treat learning language as a chore and as work, it just makes it so hard. You know, we all have so many things to do and so many things pulling at our time and sometimes you just need to relax, so you can’t practice as much as you might want to, so I think if you can find ways to use the language that are fun and that don’t feel like work then to me, that’s great, that’s amazing.
H: That’s definitely true for me. I try to study Russian with my language-learning app for 15 minutes every day, and even that is hard to fit in.
E: Yes. I agree. Learning a language should be fun and memorable.
H: So, Patti, we used your song, Adventurous Girl, for the 7th Episode of Season 2 of our podcast. We love the melody.
E: And the grammar. We haven’t done a song about the present perfect since Season 1, Episode 3, Queen’s, “We are the Champions.”
H: Ece, that was a very natural use of the present perfect.
E: Thanks, I have practiced it. Anyway, Patti can you tell us about the background of the song, “Adventurous Girl”?
P: Adventurous Girl was the first song I wrote for English language learners, and at the time I remember that my students were struggling with all of the verb forms that you need for the perfect aspect, so those past participles, and that was what I really wanted to focus on for this song so you can see it has lots and lots of different verbs in it and then there’s a middle section that uses simple past so that you can see the contrast between simple past and present perfect because that was always difficult, too.
H: It really has so many great examples of the present perfect.
E: And, you’re right. It’s great to have the contrast between the simple past and present perfect all in one song.
H: You can’t really find that in a song that wasn’t specifically written to illustrate a grammar point.
E: Ok. One last question: Patti, do you consider yourself to be an, “adventurous girl”?
P: In terms of actually being an adventurous girl, I should say that I have not done probably most of these things. I have never swum in the Nile. I can’t actually really swim very well and I haven’t been to Australia and things like that but I do think, as I have gotten older, I have gotten braver and more adventurous so in a way, I guess I like to think of myself as an adventurous girl maybe not a girl anymore but an adventurous woman I guess. Yeah, so hopefully this song will inspire other people too, a little bit.
H: I think this song will inspire our listeners.
E: Not just in their English grammar, but in their lives.
H: We all need to be a little adventurous.
E: Well, Patti, we have had a great time talking with you today.
H: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your experience.
P: Thank you so much for having me, Heather and Ece.
Official YouTube Video of Adventurous Girl
Complete Lyrics
Oh, I’ve flown in fancy planes, ridden ‘round on high speed trains Oh, I’ve driven classic cars, eaten steak and caviar, Oh, I’ve scaled the highest cliffs, sailed the sea in rugged ships,
I’ve climbed the highest mountains, drunk my fill from natural fountains
I am an adventurous girl; I have seen the whole world and I like it
Better not slow me down, ‘cause I have been around, and I’m not going to hide it
Oh, I’ve stood upon the Great Wall, seen the domes of the Taj Mahal
Oh, I’ve crossed the polar ice caps, trekked across the arid Outback,
Oh, I’ve seen the cliffs of Dover, walked through fields of Irish clover
Oh, I’ve swum across the Nile, gazed at Mona Lisa’s smile
I am an adventurous girl; I have seen the whole world and I like it
Better not slow me down, ‘cause I have been around, and I’m not going to hide it
Oh, I’ve been in trendy clubs, danced until the sun came up Oh, I’ve had fun with my friends, and I’d do it all again
When I was very young, I was scared, held my tongue, ‘cause I thought I’d get laughed at But, I turned things around, spoke my mind, held my ground, and I never have looked back
I am an adventurous girl; I have seen the whole world and I like it
Better not slow me down, ‘cause I have been around, and I’m not going to hide it
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