Music and languages, the importance of music in language learning
Music is a very common element and used when learning a foreign language. What is the cause of that? There are several reasons that justify the use of music in learning another language.
The first thing that comes to mind is that music helps to encourage interaction within the classroom due to the relaxed atmosphere it causes in the students or the interest it can arouse in the student himself if he listens to it alone when that music likes it. particularly. But in addition, there are scientific reasons: scientists say that listening to songs involves the same area of the brain as that used to learn a language.
- A study that demonstrates the benefits of music in learning another language is the experiment conducted by the French scientist Daniel Schön. The experiment consisted of creating a list of six words that did not mean anything that had a large number of syllables in common: Gimysy, Mimosi, Pogysi, Pymiso, Sipygy and Sysipi. With these they created a sound file that repeated them for seven minutes to be listened to by 26 Francophone subjects. Next they asked the subjects to try to identify these words in a list. The result was that the percentage of success was similar to what they could have had if they had guessed, therefore it could be said that they had learned nothing. However, they did a second test to another group of participants in which the same words were reproduced with a certain intonation and melody: the result was a 64% success when it came to finding the words on the list.
In spite of being an experiment to a small group and of a same mother tongue it gives us some clues on how music can influence the learning of another language. It is also proven that music is one of the activities that stimulates more parts of the brain at the same time and can help to improve certain qualities that we will later need when learning another language: memory, the rhythm of language or the understanding of the message itself reproduced in the song. This is one of the reasons why experts recommend that children listen to music: to develop and stimulate parts of the brain that are so necessary and useful to learn a language in the future.
May 13, 2018
