Listen to music and learn the language

A few words about music. Music is obviously everywhere and has always affected people extremely in a very strong way. It is taken for granted that even the most boring and difficult tasks become much easier when we listen to it. What about learning a foreign language?

Language and music are closely interconnected. If we offer our students good musical background there is no reason why such interventions should not be helpful. While considering the possibilities of music, we found out that there are a number of techniques, which can help us to become more successful teachers. Why not? Students like the idea of listening to music and it makes our lessons more interesting. In other words we must involve them and they will learn.

Mark Lowe in his article “Language and Music” says that music can play a central role in teaching a foreign language. His main idea is that a few million years ago, our distant ancestors chanted together. Gradually the chant divided into language and music as our species evolved. But music and language still have much in common.

Many scientists interested in the origin of language believe that language and music evolved together. Here is Robbins Burling, in “The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved”:

We can imagine an early hominine with a single type of vocalization that was ancestral to both music and language. It would… have allowed close coordination among the participants. Then, after a united initial phase, vocalization would have split into 2 parts. The part carrying the emotional message would have developed a more regular beat and become music. The part that carried the more cognitive message would have turned into verbal language.

The purpose of the article is not to show the similarity between music and language but to propose classroom procedures which make good use of music.

Communicative language teaching recognizes the importance not only of lexis and syntax, but also of stress, intonation, and rhythm and voice quality in conveying our message. Lexis and syntax are cognitive, but the other aspects of speech express feeling, and are related to musical expression.

Applying principles of stress, rhythm, and intonation at our lessons improves our students’ speech. Meaning becomes clear, speech sounds more natural, and we understand what our students say. Moreover, these skills not only help to make meaning clear: they also add new emotional dimensions to our students’ speech: colour, emotional involvement, and the ability to hold an audience. As it is seen there is plenty of evidence that music can help our students to improve their speaking.

Song, which combines both music and language, can be very helpful in teaching students how to express emotion in the new language and how to speak with a comprehensible accent. A good song highlights the rhythm, the melodic shape, and the important words. When the words are memorized they deeply influence the way we speak the new language, making it more natural, and easier for others to understand. The words we hear in songs gradually build into a mental store which influences the way we speak the new language.

What songs shall we use for the teaching of English? When choosing songs we must take into consideration the ages and tastes of our students. People of different ages usually prefer listening to different styles of music. Young people normally prefer to listen to different styles of popular music which include rock music, hip hop music, rhythm and blues, jazz and many others.

What songs should we avoid?

The song must not offend for example rap songs may be unacceptable in some classrooms. When we have chosen our song, what do we ask our students to do with it? We ask them to sing together and that is the best thing to do.

Songs can also be used for more conventional exercises, such as gap- fills focusing on the article, prepositions, vocabulary and so on. But the real benefits of songs are long term. The words stick in the memory: they help us to think in the new language: they deeply influence the way we talk in the language, making our speech more natural, more comprehensible.

Let us conclude by summarizing the main ways in which we can use music to help students master a foreign language. Music and language are two forms of communication: music is more concerned with emotion, while language is more concerned with cognitive messages. Emotion and cognition overlap, which is where music and language converge. Every time we want to convey emotion in speech, we use techniques derived from music: stress, rhythm, intonation. We listen, we empathize, we comment on what is said, we follow communicative patterns, we adjust to others in numerous ways – and we are sensitive to our fellows. In classroom, we also sing songs and we thereby give our students’ speech added vitality, emotion and colour. We can stimulate the imaginations of our students – and help them to express themselves better – by asking them to listen to music and to comment on what they hear. We use music to mark important days: weddings, funerals, coronations and parties. Music has endless power to stimulate our emotions. We can use music to help our students to write more coherent and imaginative text, too. Classroom teaching that encourages music to take its natural role in language learning is much more effective – and much more interesting – than teaching devoted only to grammar and vocabulary.

References

Charles Rosen: The classical style. New York. OUP.

Dwight Bolinger: Intonation and its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse.

Stanford Steven Brown: The Origin of Music.

G. Selivanova, I. Rozova: Teaching a Foreign Language through Music. Language in culture and culture in language. Moscow.