Author: Dr. Anne Margaret Smith

There are many similarities between music and language, in the way they are organised, processed and produced. Music therefore has enormous potential as a language-learning tool, and one that can be appealing to even the least engaged or confident learners.

Phonological awareness beyond the individual phonemes of English can be facilitated by tapping into students’ existing awareness of fundamental elements of music, such as rhythm, pitch change, volume and speed. This allows language-learners to refine their comprehension and production of spoken language, and to communicate more effectively.

There is also evidence to suggest that musical activities can help learners to develop good memory strategies for retaining vocabulary and grammatical structures, so that their working memories are freed up for other, higher-order functions. Some learners need a lot of repetition of a lexical item in order to remember it, to the point that it starts to become tedious, unless we present the repetition as part of a game or a song. In a study by Ludke, Ferreire and Overy (2014), learners who sang the target vocabulary were found to be better able to remember it later than learners who only spoke it, or spoke it rhythmically.