Learn French in music with the Culturethèque

Last updated on 9 February 2025

Make songs and music a medium to teach French. The idea is not new and works wonderfully for courses for non-French speakers. This can also be used for traditional French courses for teaching grammar or to play with words and vocabulary.

The Institut Français, whose mission is to promote French culture abroad and provide a French-speaking cultural environment for teachers and learners, offers a range of remarkable educational resources. Among them, more than fifty pedagogical sheets to learn French in music through songs. They are open access and offer complete educational sequences of high quality.

Resources to learn French from the Culturetheque

The Culturetheque is a digital portal for French cultural institutions abroad that offers many resources that can be downloaded or consulted online. Attention normally these are accessible anywhere in the world, except from France. Press, books, documentaries, resources are interesting and of course useful for all actors of the Francophonie. To have full access, you must contact the French Institute or Alliance Française closest to your home to register.

While many resources are inaccessible from France, others are open and searchable by all. This is the case of the ‘Teachers’ Corner’, which offers downloadable pedagogical sheets.

Music to learn French

Bringing music into the classrooms is the aim of the ‘And in addition I sing in French’ project. The Institut français invites you to discover French-speaking songs that reflect the vitality and diversity of today’s musical scenes. More than 50 titles are offered, accompanied by a rich four-page pedagogical sheet.

Each of them offers the lyrics of the song and an explanation of the difficult words of the text.  There is also a whole series of activities, exercises and their corrections. All can be downloaded in PDF format to be printed cleanly. It is also possible to recover the file in PowerPoint format to be able to modify it simply. The song can of course not be downloaded live but a link allows most often to watch the clip on a platform like YouTube.

A corner of teachers to explore. In addition to all these pedagogical sheets focused on songs, this open access space also offers many pedagogical sheets on youth books. A veritable cave of Al-Baba.