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provides a natural way of learning language. D. Holdaway in The Foundations of Literacy
puts it this way, “Chant, song, dance, and linguistic rituals are among the most powerful forms
of human learnings” (57-58). Holdaway continues with describing music and movement as,
“primitively satisfying, deeply memorable, and globally meaningful. Much of its power comes
from the sense of security generated by repetition, familiarity, and universality” (57-58). These
are the keys to learning any type of music or foreign language: repetition, familiarity, and
universality. The children and students need to feel comfortable with what they are learning,
and in order to accomplish this, the teacher needs to have ways of lowering the affective filter
in the classroom. With the frequent use of music, this allows for children and students to add
to their understanding of the rhythm of language in a joyful, natural way.
When it comes to familiarity, students need to be encouraged to practice singing a new
song they have just learned, until they know it well. Once the students know the words, they
are comfortable with the rhythm of the song and are able to associate the words, especially if
they are given recall exercises. One commonly used activity of this in any classroom is the fill in
the blank activity. Students familiarize themselves with a song and eventually they are able to
fill in the gaps of missing information. Because they learn the words to the rhythm and melody
of a song, the students become more comfortable in learning to recognize the written words.
The songs themselves give a structure and a pronunciation that will forever be burned in the
mind of a learner. The end result shows that reading tends to come more naturally to students
who learn to sing the words first (James 36).
Music has become a great tool in teaching a foreign language, one that opens the minds
of the students to be creative. One way of using music to teach that has become successful
is what I have mentioned before with playing background music in the classroom. Along
with generating a comfortable environment, the use of background music also stimulates
the minds of the learners, allowing for creativity to flow. Carmen Fonseca Mora mentions
an example of this stimulating exercise in her journal article “Foreign Language Acquisition
and Melody Singing.” She explains that during this process an interaction of faculties build
up our understanding of our environment. This had been previously confirmed during an
experiment of Ray Jackendoff in 1992 in his book Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental
Representations:
The participants were given a picture and asked to tell a story related to it that
included a beginning, a climax, and an ending. They could choose whether to
speak in Spanish or English. Before narrating the same story for a second time, they relaxed
by listening for three minutes to quiet instrumental music that included water sounds and
birdsong. They were then asked to repeat the same story they had told some moments ago.
The background music was not switched off while they were speaking, although the volume
was turned down. During the second narration they started verbalizing information that had
not been coded visually, but rather proceeded from the musical input. They included things
that were not in the original picture and, taking the position of an omniscient narrator, they
talked about the characters’ feelings. In this way, visual, auditory-musical, and emotional
information was encoded linguistically (147-148).
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