SERVICE AND PARTNERSHIPS
Music as a tool for language learning
Parsa Fouladi , Year 12 student
The origin of the idea
The recent conflict in Ukraine has us all feeling we can do more on a humanitarian front . Sevenoaks ’ recognition of the importance of Service has allowed both students and staff to contribute collectively towards helping the ongoing crisis . By virtue of Sevenoaks Welcomes Refugees , a local charity , we were given the opportunity to teach English to those displaced by the conflict . With this also came the need to plan , exercise and experiment with different teaching methods : how do I make lessons engaging ? How do I make lessons fun ? And most importantly , how do I teach Ukrainians without being able to speak Ukrainian ? There was a need for a basis we could all connect with , something that we would be able to enjoy , and something we could ultimately use to learn English . The answer seemed obvious : Music . Utilising music in an academic context might seem somewhat impractical given how personalised our taste in music is . However , my thought was that musicality exists as something biologically innate and could therefore potentially be used as a teaching tool that overcame initial language barriers .
Research into music and learning a language
To understand how I could use music in a teaching capacity I reflected first on my own experience of learning language at pre-school . We were never told to recite our ABCs as children ; we were invited to sing them . Fast forward some years and I found myself singing nursery rhymes . But then , after a few academic years , the singing stopped – perhaps felt as something too childish to be used in a secondary classroom setting .
I then set about a period of research within the field of cognitive neuroscience related to music and language . My research illustrated how musical training triggers neuroplastic changes in the hippocampus , a region heavily involved in long-term memory retrieval ( Herdener et al ., 2010 ). Understanding the neural basis behind why this practice was so effective involves a look at one of the brain ’ s most dynamic and interesting systems : the mirror neurone system ( MNS ). Mirror neurones have a distinct function ; these neurones respond with the same activity and intensity when an individual completes an action and when that same individual sees that same action being performed by another ( Acharya & Shukla , 2012 ). For example , a mirror neuron will fire if I press a button ; that same neuron will fire if I see someone else press that same button . When looking at where music and the MNS intersect , the frontoparietal MNS is a point of discussion as it has many auditory-motor qualities . The frontoparietal MNS connects two brain regions , the inferior frontal gyrus ( IFG ) and the inferior parietal lobule ( IPL ). The IFG , also known as Broca ’ s area , is a focal region concerning language development and processing ( Cone et al ., 2008 ). More recently however , it has been linked to musical syntax processing and synaptic computation respective to musical training ( Jiang et al ., 2023 ). Additionally , older electrophysiological studies provide further evidence for the IFG playing a causal role in musical interpretation ; patients with lesions in the left IFG performed worse in musical syntax processing tests compared to those with no lesions in the IFG , demonstrating its role in understanding and appreciating lyrical significance and chord progressions in songs ( Patel , 2003 ). Based on data from the studies I looked at , I was able to target specific areas in the English language that were hard to grasp from a neurobiological perspective ; these included non-conflicting rhymes , pararhyme and false rhyme ( e . g PINT-MINT ). It occurred to me that there was no better medium than music to approach these areas .
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