DOWNTOWN : Karaoke Helps Tune Class’s English Skills

Whitney Houston recently helped to teach an English class for immigrants at Evans Community Adult School, a cube-shaped building at Figueroa Street and Sunset Boulevard.

Well, her music helped, that is.

With the aid of a karaoke machine, Asian and Latino students sang along to Houston’s ballad “I Will Always Love You” during their morning English class. Their teacher, Julie Pasos, decided to use the machine usually found in nightspots to encourage her beginning and intermediate students to listen to themselves as they try out new words and phrases.

“You listen, you speak and you practice,” Pasos, a Hollywood resident, told her students. Her students come from Vietnam, China, Japan, Korea, and South and Central America. Evans’ 10,000 students from 80 countries make it the country’s largest adult school.

By using the karaoke machine, Pasos said, she expects her students to get a better understanding of spoken English because they will learn new words and idioms that are part of mainstream America.

The karaoke machine came with two microphones and several compact discs. When Pasos hooked up the machine to a television, which displayed lyrics from the songs, students were hesitant at first. But when the music filled the room, students began to tap their pencils and feet to the beat of the song. As the words appeared on the screen, some students eagerly sang out loud, while others just giggled to each other.

If a difficult word appeared on the screen, Pasos would pause the song and give the correct pronunciation and explain the meaning of the word. Before the class was over, Pasos had her multiethnic students singing songs ranging from Perry Como’s ballad “It’s Impossible” to Billy Ray Cyrus’ country-Western hit “Achy Breaky Heart.”

“I liked it very much,” Yvette Brissado said in Spanish after class. Brissado, a native of Nicaragua, was attending her first English class and was pleasantly surprised by the music.

“It helps you to pronounce and understand much more,” she said. “And I like the dynamics of the class (with the karaoke machine) because a lot of students are tired when they come in this early. The music peps them up.”

Pasos, 47, considers it a fun way to teach class. Throughout her 20 years as an English teacher, Pasos said, she has tried to find creative ways to help her students understand the English language--whether written or spoken.

She has used hand puppets--a snake for the S sound and a fly for the Z--to liven up a class, and she has shown snippets from old Laurel and Hardy movies to get classes to describe the action in the films.

She said she got the idea of using a karaoke machine when she began voice lessons and became interested in using it herself.

Pasos said she only uses the karaoke machine as a treat, explaining: “Overuse diminishes its effectiveness.”