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Another similarity between music and a foreign language is the fact that music is filled
with patterns, and language needs to follow similar kinds of patterns as well. This is where
music merges with language to form a specific tool of teaching that will be productive for
the student. In a foreign language classroom, the units and lessons are written and formed
in order for the students to learn from a pattern. For example, many textbooks in French will
have a lesson based on what people like to do in their free time, and the next lesson will be
over the passé composé and question words. Following this, the student will learn how to ask
things about what someone did last weekend or how they spent the day yesterday. The units
must follow a specific order or else the student will have a very hard time following a disjointed
text and an exam in the end, which will not seem contextualized. Interestingly enough, music
can help stabilize language learning and make the pattern more concrete. When do we start
knitting together music and language in students’ lives, so in the end they are able to pull a
language together aided by their knowledge of music?
Teaching language and music together starts very early in a child’s life, often through simple
songs. Music usually evokes a memory of some sort. Many of us can relate to a time in our
lives through a particular song. I know in my own personal history that music has played an
important role in learning. When I was in grade school, every year our small town put on a
Christmas Swedish festival, and the grade school students had to learn not only traditional
Swedish songs, but also the dances to accompany them. I can still remember how to sing
Silent Night in Swedish to this day. It is not only the words I remember, but also things such
as rhythm, pitch and tone of the song that match those Swedish words. Alan R. James in his
article, “When I Listen to Music,” explains this in a helpful way, “The more rhythms a child
hears and moves to, the more patterns he will be able to recognize” (37). The same can be
applied to learning a foreign language. The more the target language is approached with a
strong pattern, a strong rhythm, the more the student will be able to recognize the vocabulary
and the correct sentence construction. And marrying music to language can solidify that
memory even more.
Music might be good at establishing patterns, but it also works well at establishing
other important elements. For young children, music offers a safety net with their instructors.
“Music helps establish a comfortable feeling in the learning environment by allowing the
teacher to share something with kids” (James 36). I believe that this can also translate to the
college classroom. One thing I have observed in my own classroom is the openness students
feel when they hear music in the background. At the beginning of the semester, the students
come in not knowing one another and feeling insecure because they are in a foreign language
setting. They know they will have to eventually speak in this new language. Even in English
this can be hard for many students. With the background music playing, that empty sound of
nothingness is nonexistent when someone does not want to speak up. What the music does
is provide the means for a bonding experience to occur. The students soon learn to be at ease
with one another, thus breaking the nervous tension. At a later point in the semester, I found
my students more willing to speak and less embarrassed, because they had that early on “icebreaking”
experience with the music.
Childhood development with language in the classroom not only establishes a
comfortable feeling within the environment where the children are going to learn, but it also
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