If you haven’t seen the film A Star Is Born yet, you’re missing out on a very enjoyable couple of hours. This romantic musical drama explores the ups and downs of fame while being set to an excellent soundtrack. The acting is quality, but it was the main song, Shallow, which won the film an Oscar in 2019. For this activity, we will look at Reading and Use of English Part 1 in the First (FCE) exam using the song, Shallow. Using an FCE song activity can help motivate and focus students more than a boring old exam task.
Contents
The Song – Shallow
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper share the spotlight with this uplifting track. Described as a country and folk pop power ballad, Lady Gaga wrote the song along with some other songwriters for the Sony motion picture A Star Is Born. When interpreting the lyrics (which would be a great follow-up activity in class) there are themes of heartache, addiction or dreams being shattered.
Listen to the song on YouTube.
A lot of your students may know the song already, but they might not have analysed the lyrics. It’s pretty clear and intelligible, so it will work well as an FCE song for B2 level students.
The Materials
Reading and Use of English Part 1 in the FCE exam is technically a Reading task, but has the look and feel of a Use of English task, much to many students’ and teachers’ confusion.
It deals primarily with vocabulary through a multiple choice cloze task that has 8 gaps with 4 options for each. The challenge lies in the possible answers, which can seem irritatingly similar. Focusing on differences in meaning and use between synonyms is essential to discover why one answer works over another. Paying attention to dependent prepositions, phrasal verbs and word forms can also help determine which answers fit best in the gap.
Students should get lots of practice with this part of the exam, but sometimes doing exam tasks can get dull. That’s why we’ve come up with this FCE song activity to breathe a bit of life back into dull exam practice.
EXAM PART: FCE Reading and Use of English Part 1
TIME: 20 minutes + lyrics interpretation
PREPARATION: One copy of the FCE song worksheet per student
Procedure
- Warm up with some questions about music and music in films. Movie Music Quiz is a fantastic website in which you have to guess the name of the film based on the song and works very well as a lead-in.
- Students analyse the text quickly and answer some questions about the format of the task (note: because some lyrics are repeated, some questions appear more than once in the text)
- Students complete the exam-style FCE song “Shallow” activity
- Listen to the song to check answers
- Discuss the differences in meaning of other answers and why the other options weren’t correct
- Analyse and interpret the lyrics (perhaps having a debate)
