First (FCE) Song – Fast Car – Tracy Chapman

Whenever I look for a song to do with a class, I look for something that has a story behind it. With this FCE song activity, you’ve got just that. Fast Car is a beautiful song released April 6, 1988 by Tracy Chapman. Spanning a lifetime of hardship, it tells the story of a couple’s challenging life from the woman’s point of view. In the end, the message is about escaping the cycle of poverty and how life tends to repeat itself.

The Song – Fast Car

After reaching a global audience through an appearance at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday celebration, the song reached the top ten in the USA and the UK. It then went on to be nominated for 2 Grammys.

Listen to the song on Youtube.

The pace and rhythm of the song make it a good candidate for B2 level students and an FCE song activity. Chapman’s lyrics are both intelligible and reasonably simple while at the same time telling a story that many students may relate to.

There’s also a live version of the song, which is a little bit slower paced if you want to make the task a bit easier.

The Materials

This FCE song activity uses the format of Listening Part 2. This part of the exam is always a monologue of a person explaining a topic such as their job or a cultural concept. It’s also famous for including distractors.

The song doesn’t include any distractors like the ones you would find in the exam, but it could serve as a training task. One of the best ways to train for Listening Part 2 is via prediction. Before listening, take a look at each gap in the song and try to predict the content. Sometimes, you can predict the right answer, but if that’s too much, you should at least be able to determine what type of word (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, date, place) is needed.

A nice FCE song activity can brighten up standard listening practice either as a class activity with a follow up debate on the topic of class struggle or as a homework activity to demonstrate how the English we experience in everyday life can help us get ready for an official exam.

EXAM PART: Listening Part 2

TIME: 20 minutes + lyrics interpretation

PREPARATION: One copy of the FCE song activity per student

Procedure

1. Warm up by discussing life-changing moments. The best way to do this is by telling a personal anecdote from your life. Alternatively, you could put JOB, FAMILY, LOVE or the board and ask students to discuss how these things can cause changes in your life.
2. Discuss the benefits of prediction for FCE Listening Part 2.
3. Tell your students to work in pairs and predict the word that goes in the space. Do the first one together as a model.
4. Listen to the song twice to let students complete the exam-style FCE song activity. Compare answers between listenings if it seemed difficult for them.
5. Reflect on whether the prediction phase was beneficial.
6. Analyse and interpret the lyrics (perhaps having a debate about class struggle or how change is not always what we hoped it would be).

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