The playful segment as a social configuration for L2 learning through student-appropriated singing

This instrumental case study examines how first-year secondary students in Spain appropriated a teacher-planned English-language song activity and sustained voluntary collective singing during break time. Over three weeks, a familiar song circulated between the classroom and a peripheral area of the playground, where students chose when to sing, how to join in and how to support one another. Drawing on field notes, four group interviews and reflexive diaries, the analysis traces this student-led appropriation, peer participation and the use of school space. Musical coordination prompted attention to difficult words, peer modelling and repetition, but the study does not claim measurable gains in pronunciation. We develop the playful segment as a situated way of describing the spontaneous, unprompted extension of a curricular resource into voluntary, peer-regulated activity. Brief sung fragments also resurfaced during ongoing classroom tasks without interrupting them. The case illustrates how students can make a classroom resource part of their own social and musical life at school.