Traditionally popular songs have been used as a way of enhancing listening and auditory
perception skills and teaching vocabulary, but not necessarily for memory recall. Popular
song gap-fills are already commonplace within the EFL (English as a foreign language) field;
however, this study found that more attention needs to be given, to the lexical, grammatical
and phonological items that learners are instructed to retain. The results of this study
suggest that, verbal memory is a vital part of language learning that should be incorporated
into popular song gap-fills and that EFL teachers, theorists and textbook authors need to
review the way language in popular songs is encoded, stored and retrieved, by incorporating
memory strategies, following guidelines on gap-selection, including a phonological aspect
and using a recycling activity. In this article traditional and contemporary understandings of
verbal memory and popular song are outlined and comprehensively analysed within relevant
fields that embrace ELT (English language teaching), Biology, Psycholinguistics,
Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Psychology perspectives and discusses their pedagogical
implications
