‘Singlish’ in the Classroom
Most of the songs used tend to fall into one of the following categories and often into more than one:
1. Industrial Ballads including mining, work in mills, sea songs and shanties.
2. Historical songs including Glencoe, marching songs, recruiting ballads
3. Transportation ballads, Australia, USA
4. Love songs, the village, life before the industrial revolution
5. Children’s songs
6. Nonesense songs
Early on in your discussion you can introduce this idea and ask them to categorise the songs accordingly.