Benefits of using Music as and ELT tool

Benefits of the Use of Music as a Tool for English Language Teaching 

By Edith López

Listen while reading!

It is music the tool that Teachers have been using in English language teaching for many years. However, teachers do not really know the benefits of  music and only use it as a simple tool;  Engh, D., mentions that (2013) “while many teachers intuitively feel that music is beneficial in teaching English language, there is sometimes a lack of the theoretical underpinnings that support such a choice.”

Music in ESL has different approaches and benefits, according to Paquette, K. et. al (2008). It can be used to teach a variety of language skills, such as sentence patterns, vocabulary, pronunciation, rhythm, and parts of speech. Taking as a reference the previous statement,  the main aim of this document is to analyze the use of music in language teaching, in order to create awareness of this tool and how teachers could improve its use.

According to Butzlaff, R. (2000), it is music that can make learners feel more engaged with the English language,  this may be because when learners listen to something they like, they feel motivated to learn the language in order to understand the lyrics of a song. In other words, it is the students' musical connection with the language that makes  it easier to understand and assimilate the language; due to the fact that the process is more natural, instead of being something that learners do not feel comfortable with it.

Nowadays, people are in direct contact with music almost every day, thus songs have a real-life impact in the learning process of a new language.  Nunan argues, “the validity of using authentic and natural language input including real-world/target tasks, pedagogical tasks, and enabling skills” makes a “some sort of relationship to comparable real-world activities” (as cited in Engh, D., 2003). In addition, it was Paquette, K. R., & Rieg, S. A. (2008) who mentioned that “music can enhance students’ creativity and cultural awareness”.  This is a crucial factor to take into consideration, due to that with a better understanding of the culture, the learner can understand better the language, its idiomatic expressions, and will be able to increase its Descriptive knowledge of the target language.

It is well known by most of the linguists, that the use of music within the learning process helps the student to develop his listening and speaking skills; this can be compared with the stage of the acquisition of the native language in which the speaker tries to imitate what others said, its pitch, and tempo. It is echo reading one of the most important activities which represent this kind of process (Paquette, K. R., & Rieg, S. A., 2008);  that is when one a person reads one sentence of text aloud with appropriate intonation and phrasing. The second student imitates this oral reading model and the echoing interaction continues until the student can imitate more than one sentence.

As Butzlaff (2000) mentioned, it is also music that provides phonological distinctions; distinctions train the speaker with an auditory sensitivity that is useful in listening to music. Also, music has different uses related to linguistics, rhythm, and rhyme. It was Engh, D. (2013) who provided an example of this is an mentioned that: the use of rhythm and rhyme to assist auditory recall has also been studied, and the multimodal combination of rhythm, melody, and rhyme along with linguistic prosody appears to lead to greater retention.

We can say that it is music who has differents benefits in the English Language Teaching: such as better understanding of the descriptive use of the language, the acquisition, and memorization of vocabulary, the development of the listening and speaking skills, also it can motivate the student in order to a meaningful learning experience in the classroom.

References

Butzlaff (2000). Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4, Fall/Winter 2000. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Engh, D. (2013). Why Use Music in English Language Learning? A Survey of the Literature. English Language Teaching, 6(2), 113-127.

Paquette, K. R., & Rieg, S. A. (2008). Using music to support the literacy development of young English language learners. Early Childhood Education Journal, 36(3), 227-232.

 Do you know another benefit? Or how can we use music as a Tool? Let us know in the comments!