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Once upon a time, while doing a survey in a secondary school in a remote area of Switzerland, I showed my questionnaire to the teacher before a class. One part of it had a list of the artists from the current Top 40, and she tried to identify them. Failing to recognize all but a few, she told me that her students surely would not do much better. In class, she was astonished when the students eagerly started writing song titles beside the names of nearly all the artists. As I walked around the class, I asked her to join me. On the cover of nearly every notebook and book-bag were the names and logos of the pop groups that were on the questionnaire. She had never seen them before (or had not realized what they were!). A lively discussion followed the completion of the questionnaire and the teacher was amazed at how well her students voluntarily expressed themselves in English about my research and their musical tastes and habits. From what I could see, she was a very good teacher, who had established good rapport with her students, but she had never suspected her students’ intense interest in and knowledge of pop music.

A few months later, I received a letter thanking me for showing her how to tune in to her students’ interests, saying she had never seen them more motivated than since she had started asking them to teach her about their music and how they perceived it. Of course, that had not been my goal at all – I was simply collecting data for my research. Her gratitude did, however, reinforce my belief that highly motivated language learning starts with the students and what they are interested in. ‘As language teachers we are the most fortunate of teachers – all subjects are ours. Whatever (the students) want to communicate about, whatever they want to read about, is our subject matter.’ (Rivers 1976:96)

Why this book?

Music is everywhere and all students have musical tastes. This book is intended as a tool for tapping into this resource. I also hope it will show teachers how stimulating it is to tune in to the wealth of information, reactions, and feelings already there in our students. The advantage of musical materials is that they are so readily available to the teacher, and so immediately motivational to most students.

Songs alone, however, will not teach anyone how to use language – no matter how great their memorability, how much fun it is to sing and listen to them, or how ‘energizing’ the change of pace might be. Just listening to and singing songs will not make students able to communicate in another language.

For three years I was in a choir. We learnt songs by heart in about a dozen languages that we did not speak. However, we were incapable of using the language in the songs for communication. This does not mean that we did not learn something of the sound system which might have helped us later had we studied the languages. But what we learnt in the choir could not be transferred, as it was, to natural language use.

In other words, of themselves, songs can be immensely valuable for developing certain capacities, but they can be many times more valuable if we exploit them creatively to bridge the gap between the pleasurable experience of listening/singing and the communicative use of language. That is the major goal of this book: to show how to use songs and music as enhancers, reinforcers, or as centre-pieces for communicating in the classroom. Thus, this book provides some basic starting points from which the teacher and class can diverge or progress creatively to a variety of individually adapted activities.

Finally, I hope this book will be used as a means for teachers to increase rapport with their students. Music and song is a communal activity in which, for a while, the world becomes one. Everything we see, everything we do is associated with the sound we are hearing (and which is echoing in our minds). The use of music and song in the classroom can stimulate very positive associations to the study of a language, which otherwise may only be seen as a laborious task, entailing exams, frustration, and corrections.

The importance of music and song in language learning

Many of us have experienced with amazement how quick students are at learning songs. It is also a common experience to forget nearly everything we learn in another language except the few songs that we learnt. For a variety of reasons, songs stick in our minds and become part of us, and lend themselves easily to exploitation in the classroom.

1 Although modern technology has universalized access to song, it could be that song actually preceded and aided the development of speech in homo sapiens (Livingstone 1973). If we think about it for a second, it is easier to put intonation on ‘lalalalala’ than it is to make the finer distinctions required by language, i.e. to sing with vocalizations is significantly easier than speech. But what is even more amazing is that is also seems easier to sing language than to speak it.