Stromae & Soprano on Social Media

I created two class activities on the use of social media and smartphones through two popular french music videos: Stromae’s Carmen (2013) and Soprano’s Mon précieux (2016).

• Fill-in-the-Blanks Lyrics Handout
• Answer Key Handout
• Downloadable PowerPoint – you can copy and paste slides directly into your presentation.
• Online PowerPoint slides

To make the Carmen activity more communicative, I recommend pausing the music video halfway through – at 1:46 – and asking students how they think the story might end.

The provocative reveal at the end usually gets students talking about how technology and social media might control our lives. I wrote down several question prompts on the slideshow linked above.

• Lyrics Handout

To take the discussion further, a second example from French music on our obsession with smart phones is Soprano’s similarly engaging music video.

For this activity, I recommend hiding the first half of the music video, showing only the lyrics and letting student guess who or what “my precious” might be without the visual input from the video.

At the end, a discussion on how these two songs focus on different aspects of social networks is a good opportunity for students to practice vocabulary from technology, the media, and our digital lives.