Taboo Language in the Classroom Context

I use to work with mass media in my classes since students are really motivated, the idea of watching a movie, sending e-mails or listening to their favourite songs is specially interesting for them and at the same time they are manipulating the language in real life context. This activity is used in straightforward ways; students listen to pop songs and fill in the lyrics or put the verses in the correct order.
Students from second year of secondary school were asked to prepare a practical work with lyrics they liked most under some conditions, such as providing the song, writing the lyrics on a poster, saying the topic of the song, drawing a picture related to the topic and giving some information about the singer or band. One of the groups chose a song by Eminem (a controversial white rapper) which was full of taboo language.
The group followed all the requirements to do the task, i.e., they provided the cd with the song, they wrote the lyrics on a poster, they talked about the topic, they drew a graffiti and gave information about the singer. They also brought a photo of Eminem. They liked the topic of the song which was really aggressive and full of taboo language. They knew the general meaning of those words and they seemed to expect a certain teacher’s reaction. They were a group of rebel teenagers who usually wanted to create conflict in class and test the teacher’s skills in dealing with conflicts and the teacher’s knowledge on second language.
At first, I felt embarrassed since my role as an educator was to teach not only English as a second language but also values. As Freire points out “…human activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world. And as praxis it required theory to illuminate it” (as cited in Hoffman-Kipp,P., Artiles, A & Lopez-Torres, L. “Beyond reflection: teachers teaching as praxis”, 2003, para.4). Therefore, I tried to explain the meaning of taboo words as natural as possible since they knew the meanings from movies , for instance.
We analysed the relationship between violence and taboo language, physical and verbal violence and tried to find possible solutions to solve some relationship problems that occurred in the school, recently. As Crawford (1994) states “Reflection that develops a political consciousness might involve teachers integrating curriculum around concepts and issues that would be of current interest to both student and teacher or focusing on inquiry and using literature to support that inquiry, thus helping their students not only to be problem-solvers, but to become problem-posers”.( as cited in Hoffman-Kipp,P., Artiles, A & Lopez-Torres, L. “Beyond reflection: teachers teaching as praxis”, 2003, para. 3).
I also guided them to infer the differences between standard English ( the language commonly taught at schools) and every day language ( the language commonly used in talk among friends of colleagues). Helping students to improve their listening to spoken language is extremely important in the English class because the better students understand what they hear, the better they will take part in spoken interactions
To conclude, reflection is relevant in the teaching-learning process , for both students and teacher. We may reflect alone or in discussion with others in order to solve problems and pose problems, too. The challenge is to create the necessary conditions to support reflection in the classroom.

References:
Hoffman-Kipp, P., Artiles, A. J., & Lopez Torres, L. (2003). Beyond
reflection: teacher learning as praxis. Theory into Practice. Retrieved
October 2007, from
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NQM/is_3_42/ai_108442653