Elisabeth ChanThe International Center for EnglishArkansas State UniversityDelta Symposium – April 6, 2011

At what age did you startlistening to music as ahobby?

As adults an adult, whattype of music are youmost nostalgic for? Is itmusic you listened toas a teenager or youngadult?

(Levitin, 2006)

The same amount of vocabulary was acquired from listening to a song as listening to a story.

More words were acquired when they were sung rather than spoken.

But the greatest amount of vocabulary was acquired when the stories were both sung and illustrated! (Medina,1993)

This Song Is Stuck In

My Head!

Pop songs have a high verb count and

few concrete referents for

participants, times, and places.

Baby talk by adults and words in pop songs shares many similar aspects (Murphey and Alber, 1985)

(Murphey, 1998)

“Rhythmical

structure allows it to

be more memorable”

(Sagawa, 1999)

It is to teenagers,

what “baby talk” is to babies.

Music is the “Motherese of Adolescence”

•Verbal thoughts•Words used for thinking

• When children repeat words to themselves• Thinking aloud

•Rehearsing speech or song silently in your mind

Pronunciation is more than pronouncing the sound /b/ correctly for the letter “B”.

Stressing the correct syllables and how you say certain words of a sentence faster than others is more important to increase English comprehensibility.

Different languageshave different stressand timing.

I | read a BOOK | in the LIbrary | YESterday.

Ki/no/u/ to/sho/ka/n/ de/ ho/n/ wo/ yo/mi/ma/shi/ta.

In the English example, you take the same amount of time to say “read a book” as “in the library”, although there are more syllables.

In the Japanese example, each syllable receives the same amount of time.

Using music to teach English can help increase comprehensibility and intelligibility by helping by helping students with their stress-timing!

Chan, E. & Beni, K. (2007). Sounds Good to Me: Using Music and Song in L2 Teaching Workshop. Presented at DaTESL hosted at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Levitin, D. (2006). This is your brain on music: The science of a human obsession. New York, NY: Dutton Adult.

Medina, S. (1993). The effect of music on second language vocabulary acquisition. FEES News (National Network for Early Language Learning), 6(3), 1-8.

Murphey, T. (1990). The song stuck in my head phenomenon: A melodic din in the LAD? System, 18(1), 53-64.

Murphey, T. (1992). The discourse of pop songs. TESOL Quarterly, 26(4), 770-774.

Murphey, T. (1992). Music & song. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphey, T. & Alber, J.L. (1985). A pop song register: The motherese of

adolescents as affective foreigner talk. TESOL Quarterly, 19(4), 793-795. Sagawa, M. (1999). TESOL: The use of arts in language teaching. Retrieved

March 30, 2011, from http://homepage3.nifty.com/mmsagawa/hooked/tesol_art.html