Lyricstraining, a website helps students self-learn English in their spare time

Learning Autonomy has been very popular in the Chinese education sector during recent years. Educators encourage teachers and parents 'let students go', and try to motivate them to study independently with interests. 

Actually, it is difficult for students to achieve Learn Autonomy because most of these students are still children or teenagers who want to play at their ages, rather than study. Under the pressure of their parents at home, they pretend to learn by themselves, which does not mean Autonomy. 

I have a student before who likes writing down lyrics of English songs in her notebook while she is listening to them. She tells me it is enjoyable and this work is never a burden. 

This is called self-learning.

In my mind, if a student really likes English, he or she will still do something related with English in their real spare time. 

So in today's blog, I will introduce one website called Lyricstraining, which can help students self-learn English and attract them to be exposed to English in their spare time.

screenshot of Lyricstraining website

The website Lyricstraining can be considered as one new way to learn languages through music and the lyrics of people's favourite songs. Not only English MVs are covered in Lyricstraining, videos of other languages such as French and Spanish can also be found by choosing the Language. If people like different genres of music, it also can be chosen, like Pop, Blues and so on.

screenshot of Lyricstraining website

Features

It can improve and practice learners listening skills with the best and most popular music videos. People should fill in the gaps to the lyrics as listening or singing Karaoke to people's favourites. Before starting the gap-filling game, people need choose the appropriate game mode from Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert, which can be seen as different difficulty levels.

When the MV starts, people should fill the lyric gap correctly as soon as possible. If people cannot hear the lyrics or type the wrong alphabets, that part will stop or people can put the 'right' button to continue.
(Below is one GIF that I made when playing Lyricstraining)

Advantages and Drawbacks

It said that 'thousands of teachers, all over the world, are already using Lyricstraining to teach languages and motivate their students through this unique immersion process'. Of course it is good to be recommended to students and they can learn some vocabularies (both spelling and pronunciation) in their favourite songs. They don't need to use 'old-fashion' way to write down lyrics in notebooks and in their free time, students are really likely to use this website from the inside, not being forced. 

However, I don't agree that teachers can use it to teach English because English songs cannot convey 'official' English language, and some words may be sung in different intonations to accompany the song.
Therefore, Lyricstraining is still a good website for students to self-learn English in spare time as a game, but it is not appropriate for teachers to teach English with it.