The use of music in the process of English language teaching and learning is a well-established practice. In fact, the use of authentic, contemporary language examples from popular songs has been proposed by many (Murphey, 1990; Lopez-Sanz, 2013; Kerekes, 2015) as a tool to enhance learners’ collocational competence, contextual understanding, and overall linguistic proficiency in English. This research aims to examine the frequency and types of collocations in a selection of song lyrics, to analyse their translation equivalents, and, by doing so, to explore the pedagogical potential of lexical collocations in song lyrics for practical applications in the process of teaching and learning English. Utilizing a corpus of 195 songs by Taylor Alison Swift, the analysis involves a comparison of lexical collocations in English and their translation equivalents in Bosnian. The findings reveal that apart from the relatively high frequency of lexical colocations, there are also certain patterns that can be observed, such as the consistent preference for adjective-noun pairings across and the total absence of adverb-verb combinations. From a contrastive perspective, the finding is that many collocations change in form and complexity during translation with a certain number of English examples losing their collocational patterns when translated to Bosnian. Such differences can make learning English collocations more challenging and demanding. However, this research underscores the value of integrating popular music into language curricula, advocating for innovative, engaging approaches to teaching English, in particular for Bosnian EFL learners, through modern, more relatable content. Article visualizations:
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Eminović et al. (2024) studied this question.
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