Scott Thornbury's suggested task of getting students to converse in their mother tongue but with "English accents" (in "Having a good jaw: voice-setting phonology") put me in mind of a couple of topics that seem to be discussed with much enthusiasm online. One is the notion of "fake English", which has spawned hundreds of Youtube videos of people trying to sound English without necessarily being able to speak any of the language. My personal favourite amongst these is this Italian song:
The second topic is more closely-related to music. A "mondegreen" is a misinterpretation of a lyric in a song (the term originates from the mishearing of the phrase "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen") and there are websites and online discussion threads devoted to listing such misunderstandings. This clip from a Bulgarian TV show in which a contestant misinterprets the whole of a Mariah Carey song (actually it's by Harry Nielsen but that's a different matter) has received over 4 million hits on Youtube.
But, to return to articles published in the Journal of ELT, there's an interesting angle on this for language teachers in the form of Geoff Smith's 2003 article "Music and mondegreens: extracting meaning from noise". The author discusses the classroom task of transcribing song lyrics and attributes his students' 'mondegreens' to "an inadequate awareness of the full range of English phonological distinctions".
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