A Corpus Linguistic Perspective on the Appropriateness of Pop Songs for Teaching C hinese as a Second Language (2020)

Abstract: Language and music are closely related. Regarding the linguistic feature richness, pop songs are probably suitable to be used as extracurricular materials in language teaching. In order to prove this point, this paper presents the Contemporary Chinese Pop Lyrics (CCPL) corpus. Based on that, we investigated and evaluated the appropriateness of pop songs for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL) with the assistance of Natural Language Processing methods from the perspective of Chinese character coverage, lexical coverage and the addressed topic similarity. Some suggestions in Chinese teaching with the aid of pop lyrics are provided.

## introduction the appropriateness of pop songs for language teaching has been widely discussed by scholars in recent years. at present, both quantitative and qualitative studies on the songs' application in the english teaching have developed maturely. meanwhile, quantitative studies have not attracted enough attention in the chinese teaching. related studies prefer to explore the songs' potential in teaching assistance in the dimensions of lyrics' linguistic features, teachers' practical experience and students' knowledge. therefore, this paper focuses on the similarity between lyrics and teaching material for tcsl. the rest of the paper is organized as follows: in section 2 the related work is surveyed, section 3 and 4 describe the ccpl corpus in detail, section 5 and 6 analyze the statistics of character coverage, lexical coverage and topic similarity of the ccpl corpus in tcsl. conclusions and future works are finally drawn in section 7. ## related work in the field of the english teaching, @xcite raised the idea of using contemporary lyrics for more inspiring and close-to-reality language teaching. @xcite compared the role of american english and british english in popular songs, and @xcite outlined its didactic potential. @xcite examined the lexical coverage of pop lyrics in english teaching, using around 1,000 songs in two collections. applications of natural language processing (nlp) tools could also be found in related work: penaranda ( 2006 ) uses text mining for empirically based genre assignments, involving linguistic anomalies. napier/shamir (2018) took a diachronic perspective and quantify emotional changes in lyrics since 1950. in the field of the chinese teaching, shouhui @xcite were the first to propose the introduction of songs into classes. they believed songs could create a good cultural atmosphere for chinese as foreign language (cfl) learners, resulting in their high interest in studying. you @xcite argued that songs could help solve the difficulties of traditional listening lessons from the perspective of psychology. chenxu @xcite affirms that music plays a positive role in enhancing cfl learners' sense of language, strengthening the ability of correcting errors and improving efficiency. yanjing @xcite puts forward that songs can help cfl learners to correct pronunciation, expand vocabulary, understand rhetoric, recognize proverbs, etc. ## corpus building the ccpl corpus contains lyrics in chinese, even if a minority are in english. given that this paper focus on the coverage of lyrics' content in tcsl, english words are excluded for noise reduction. enabling further processing with nlp tools, the original lyrics need to be transferred into annotated contents. therefore, word segmentation and part of speech (pos) tagging are needed. words extracted by topic models are also presented for comparison. ## corpus overview the key statistics on the corpus are summarized in this section, such as word length and pos distribution, and its accessibility is also provided. ## character and word analysis hsk is a standard international chinese language proficiency test for cfl learners. as an international and authoritative test, it is suitable to be used as a golden standard to measure whether lyrics are appropriate for assisting tcsl. there are 6 levels in the new syllabus of hsk. cfl learners who reach hsk6 should be competent to master 2,500 chinese characters and 5,000 words in total. in this section, repetitive types of characters and words were removed. character frequency and word frequency were computed to respectively generate the character list and word list for the comparison between the ccpl and hsk in character and word. ## topic analysis in this section, for the comparison between lyrics and hsk in topic level, we take the new general syllabus for teaching chinese as reference to summarize types of topics discussed in teaching. meanwhile, we will introduce two weighting schemes with the function of extracting main topics conveyed in lyrics, and provide a more refined classification for the types of lyrics. on the bottom, we conduct a comparative analysis. ## conclusion and future work in this paper we introduced the ccpl, a homogeneous corpus comprising of 1,110 pop songs. the paper offers the experimental results demonstrating the extent to which pop songs could be appropriate to tcsl teaching. according to the characters coverage, lyrics are suitable for cfl students in elementary level to review the characters they have grasped. as for students in intermediate level and advanced level, they can not only consolidate what they have learned, but also increase their reservation of characters. lexical coverage is not optimistic. words beyond the scope of hsk bring barriers in both teaching and learning. besides, topic coverage confirms the strength of lyrics in introducing cultural background and create multiple language environment, even if teachers may encounter small obstacles in songs selection. for future work, we intend to give a more refine comparation between lyrics and hsk in character and lexical coverage. the shared and rare characters and words in each song will be calculated. in addition, we will score the appropriateness of each song for language teaching with designing weight formula which includes the factors such as definition, figure of speech, sentence repetition, etc. with relevant information, we can carry out the songs' recommendation for cfl learners at all levels.