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PRESENTATION 

 

Music is present in our life since we are born, because it reflects culture and it is based in culture.  Therefore, music is a great experience that reflects communities and societies’ culture, because it establishes a social and experiential context that enhances social harmony. For example, we have seen that a big part of literature, epic poetry and ballads have survived because of the use of song.

 

On the other hand, composers compose music that matches with culture and, at school, music teachers are asked to teach specific songs in the vehicular language of learning, because these songs help students learn the correct way of language use. Moreover, many musicians, composers and pedagogues have established great connections between language and music like Carl Orff who maintained that in spoken language there are rhythmical, dynamic and expressive structures; or Alfred Tomatis, who argued in his method that people memorize language tones and sounds they are exposed to, and that means it is important to reeducate students to foreign language frequencies in order to integrate them in that sonorous world. Moreover, Campbell demonstrate with his method called Mozart Effect that the ear incorporates the information transmitted by sound and, then, it organizes the language; and Kodaly asserted that singing folk songs benefits language learning because melodies always match with language prosody (intonation and rhythm).

 

Therefore, we can state that music and language are two ways that humans communicate and express themselves through sound. This is because music and language share many characteristics like they are universal and specific to human beings; they have three modes of expression: vocal, gestural and written; their natural environment is auditory and vocal; they are spontaneously developed; they are a human ability to create an unlimited number of new sequences using musical contours and words and rhythm and melody are essential elements; they follow a fixed order in structure; in both, music and language, the first capacity that emerges is that of receptivity and then, consequently that of productive ability; and, finally, both are culture-bond.

 

The exchange between Baby adult talks happen in every culture around the world and, since birth, babies start to listen and produce sound without distinguishing between music and language, singing and speech and, therefore, that fact leads us state that the interaction between the environmental sounds establishes the basis of language learning, or, in other words, these exchanges of sound establish the first language code.  Children can imitate the rhythm and musical contours of the language long before they can say the words, because musical aspects of language, tone, pauses, stress and timbre are sonorous units into which phonemes, the consonant and vowel sound of language, are later placed. Moreover, fetuses and newborns demonstrate preference for melodies with simple rhythms; they also discriminate between upward and downward pitch contours and perceive a violation of the beat in a rhythmic sound sequence and they are capable of differentiating between rhythmically different languages and different speakers. Therefore, language acquisition depends on interaction and as it has been shown, music gives teachers the opportunity to create and develop interactional activities in the classroom, because music is clearly experiential. And it is important, because we don’t have to forget that when we learn a foreign language it is primarily done by translating from the first language, in other words, by auditory-auditory association.

 

Music motivates students. Somehow, music causes some effect in people that has the power to influence their feelings and emotions. It has been shown that music causes changes in blood pressure, blood flow, posture, respiratory rate, pulse rate and general activity and it influences their brain activity and cognitive abilities, because music improves creativity and imagination skills and develops memory and flexible thinking, perception, attention, intelligence and language, because it performs the ability to imitate, which is considered one of the most useful strategies in language learning. And these facts occur because when a learning activity combines both left and right hemispheres simultaneously engaged in a particular activity, an ideal learning situation is established and the most productive learning occurs. Therefore, music is a great tool to incorporate the whole brain in the learning process and, on the other hand, and as we have seen, these abilities are favored if people start learning music when they are young.

 

In relation to this topic, the language acquisition one, music is a good tool when learning grammar and vocabulary, pronunciation, language prosody (intonation and rhythm) and acquiring culture’s target language, because it gives advantage in memorization of phrase constructions; it contains pitches, melodies, rhymes, beats and measured phrases; on the other hand, it is useful to acquire the discrimination of tones and sequences of tones on pitch, intensity, duration and rhythmic dimensions, in other words, it develops hearing and phonetic skills, because children pay close attention to subtle variations in tone and timing, which enables them to learn the language accent flawlessly. Moreover, it helps when introducing and presenting social situations, historical events, and geographical descriptions in a sense of culture and, finally, it is a good memory aid, because melody provides sequential information, line and syllable length information, chunk linking, and rhythmical information which has the potential for making accurate reconstruction of the text. Experimental studies have shown and demonstrate that students who learn music get better results in foreign-language acquisition, because of the skills development that it implies, but despite the fact of these results, national studies have shown that teachers don’t use music in their lessons, basically, because they have a lack of music knowledge and materials, and furthermore, the national curriculum has globalized some aspects about music in the Arts field, which gives music less importance. On the other hand, my research has shown that future teachers are interested in learn new musical EFL approaches, because they agree that music motivates students, performs language learning and facilitates EFL acquisition.

 

Nowadays, many teachers and pedagogues talk about holistic education, so I understand that music should have a place in that education conception, because of their benefits and because it works your body, brain, emotions and spirit at the same time. And the holistic education says that people, as human beings, have to be taught in multidimensional way, which means in a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual way, the same as music gives us.