You may have heard others refer to music as a "language," or you may have used the term yourself. Music, like language, has a rhythm, structure, and set of laws that govern its use.
Is it a leap to believe that music may effectively aid in learning other languages? According to research in various areas ranging from neuroscience to educational psychology, it's not a leap and may even be one key to faster learning.
So, do our brains perceive music and language in the same way?
Researchers discovered in 2015 that we might utilize the same portion of the brain to comprehend music and language—the Broca's area, located under the left temple. However, there was a crucial distinction to their discovery: instrumental music (no lyrics) and grammar (no word meaning) were processed in the exact location.
That is, while there may be a strong resemblance between music and language, grammar and rhythm justify the analogy.
Because the music's structure and the text's system were being processed in the same section of the brain, the two information streams competed for the participants' attention.
Music and language both influence the cerebral processing of auditory information, according to a study team from the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Educational Sciences, Beijing Normal University (BNU), and the University of Turku.
Their research included Chinese primary school pupils aged 8 to 11 enrolled in music instruction and English education. Chinese people are characterized as "tonal language speakers," which means they rely mainly on pitch awareness.
Throughout the school year, the music classes required singing practice in one-hour sessions twice weekly. They received instruction in both speaking and writing in English lessons. Before and after the courses, the researchers examined their brain activity in reaction to aural stimuli. They discovered that students who took English lessons had improved brain processing of musical sounds, particularly those connected to pitch.
A foreign language program, at least in tonal language speakers, is capable of fostering auditory and music neurocognition in a manner comparable to that of a music program," they found. "Our findings support the close integration of musical and linguistic brain functions in the developing brain."
If music and language are so strongly linked in the brain, we may have a fantastic chance to use this relationship to improve foreign language learning results. An online language platform like https://livexp.com/ may help you learn a new language. Livexps Tutors are continuously experimenting with new teaching approaches to increase the efficacy of their courses.
Earlier this year, a group of German researchers discovered that singing enhanced EFL students' vocabulary and grammatical abilities in a primary school context. Compared to students who just learned vocab and grammar by reciting the lyrics, students who sang the songs made more progress in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. "Results indicate a potential benefit of singing for grammar learning," the researchers said.
Another study at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Centre in Nashville discovered that toddlers with good musical rhythm perception skills also had solid grammatical skills.
Although research on music and foreign language acquisition is still in its early stages, we can do a few things now to improve our skills. Pauline Degrave, a researcher at the University of Louvain in Belgium, describes three significant ways we might use music in the classroom:
Music can sometimes serve as a suitable backdrop for language acquisition. According to Degrave, who cites a 2006 study on the influence of background music on vocabulary recall in university students, memory for new words may be improved simply by playing the proper music in the background.
From the 1950s until the 1970s, songs were occasionally employed with the Audiolingual Method, an "approach in the teaching of foreign languages based on a system of drills in which the student repeats or adapts model sentences delivered orally or played aloud by the teacher."
Since then, educators have created a variety of other song-based foreign language teaching approaches, such as Anton's Contemporary Music Approach (1990) and Mora's Melodic Approach (2000).
An English teacher, Carolyn Graham, developed an ESL teaching approach that used the rhythms of classic American jazz to teach American English in 1993. She dubbed these classes "Jazz Chants.
The chants demonstrate the cultural relationship between music and words. Foreign language teachers worldwide have devised comparable approaches, such as the Dutch Taalriedels and the French Ritmimot.
Despite compelling data from neuroscience and foreign language literature, instructors must be bold in implementing music-based instruction in the classroom. Janelle (2017) discovered that music was seldom employed as more than a pleasurable activity in a survey on including music in English classes in Brussels Secondary French-speaking schools.
Memorizing lyrics to songs in your target language or just playing foreign music in the background while going about your regular activities might be helpful methods to experiment with improving your abilities.