Lost in Translation

A part of my preparations for my year abroad teaching in China include a TEFL certification class, which I am taking online through Marshall University. Every monday, we are given an assignment to complete by that Sunday. Generally, the assignment is a broad prompt concerning how we feel or our personal experiences with the lecture and book material for that week. As we move from the theoretical to the practical, however, the assignments direct us to create hypothetical lesson plans that focus on a particular area. 

This week, we were to create a lesson plan using jazz chants, songs, video, or games. Being a lyricist myself, I thought it would be really fun to create a lesson plan around a few of my favorite songs that have the same general themes. Emotions. Love. Daily activities. Something like that. 

As I began to search my iTunes library, however, I found that most of the music I listen to is lyrically contextual and ambiguous. As I listened to them with a foreign  ear, and an ear that has not been exposed to a lot of English, I realized that the task of finding culturally appropriate material that would not lose too much meaning in translation might be a little more difficult than I had originally anticipated. Even some of the songs that seem pretty straightforward to me, or have a lot of meaning to me, all of a sudden became too abstract and meaningless when I listened to them with a foreign ear. This is all not to mention that anything insinuating the use of drugs, sexual misdoings, or politically "hot" had to be automatically ruled out. 

I have had this issue at other instances as well, when trying to begin a collection of realia to use in my teaching. 

We really do say some curious things with our language.