Teaching Language Through Music: Reflections of a Professional Musician
By: Kim Rockell
“If music be the food of love, play on” Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
Introduction
Undissuaded by cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker’s dismissal of music as “auditory cheesecake” (Cooney, 2009), I find Mithen’s theory of “Musi-language,” which places music at the foundation of human language development (Mithen, 2006), much more appetizing. And as a professional musician, the presence of music in the language classroom has always been a “no-brainer.” Not limited to trained musicians, the benefits of musical approaches are available to all. It may be true that in highly industrialized societies roles become increasingly specialized such that professional musicians develop complex skill sets, setting them apart from those who identify as “non-musicians.” Nevertheless, song, dance, and body-percussion–“physically mediated musical activity” (Rockell, 1999)–is readily accessible. I am personally convinced that music is a universal human capacity, as emphasized by Blacking in his seminal How Musical is Man? (1973). Music is present amongst all peoples, avoided only where it is censured for ideological reasons, and not for lack of inherent musicality in a particular group of people.
Music, Mind, and Brain
What lies behind music’s almost obvious appeal? The answer may be found in the multiple brain areas that music is thought to activate, including those that govern emotional responses, pleasure, and motivation (Loui & Przysinda, 2017; Zaatar et al.,2023). Music renders text and spoken language more interesting, attractive, and enjoyable by providing aesthetically enhanced sonic information. Western society tends to look on music as a general good, as do East-Asian languages in referring to music as 音楽(Ch: yin yue/J: ongaku), literally “sound happiness.” Not surprisingly, music has been observed to positively influence the affective dimension of classroom activity (Harris, 2008; Stegemiller, 2012). In addition, researchers suggest that music helps to improve memory (Alexomanolaki et al., 2007; Mashayekh & Hasheni, 2011; Murphey, 1990; Wallace, 1994).
These, and other issues are covered extensively in Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain (2010). Looking specifically at music and language learning, Engh (2013) claimed that research in cognitive science and psycholinguistics affirm the value of music. Notwithstanding the ideas mentioned above, there remains a call for more empirical studies on precisely how memory, emotion, and music are related. Such work continues, as do candid conversations questioning the trickle-down effect of pure research on teaching practice. As an instructor of music, language, and later language through music, I have always viewed teaching as an art, honed through self-reflective practice, and it is both a pleasure and a privilege to be able to share some of my personal experiences and reflections in this article.
Personal Musical Background
As a child, the sound of my father’s mandolin in the evening as I fell asleep, a picture book featuring a mouse playing the balalaika, and blistering banjo on the Wonderful World of Disney awakened the wish to learn a string instrument. A balalaika teacher was not to be found in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand in the late 1970s, so I took up the cello instead, soon switching to classical guitar. Later, I pursued a performance career in neighboring Australia during the 1990s, a personal highlight being a solo recital at The Conservation Hut, Wentworth Falls, Blue Mountains (Guitar Artistry Asia-Pacific, 2024). I also taught classical and popular guitar styles to individuals and groups of all ages. To this day, I remain a member of the Institute of Registered Music Teachers of New Zealand (2024). Years later I discovered that a number of the techniques and strategies employed by music teachers have broad application to teaching language (Rockell & Ocampo, 2014).
Transition to Language Teaching
What prompted this transition or expansion to working with language?
I remember the New Zealand of my youth as a monolingual environment, very different from the linguascape of today, with the diverse tongues of recent migrants and the resurgence of the Māori language, of East-Polynesian origins (Otsuka, 2005). It was my younger brother David who first ventured out while still a high school student, home-staying in French speaking Tahiti, and later taking up a New Zealand government scholarship to study in China. Visiting him in Nanjing in my late-20s was an exciting awakening to the multilingual world, and my first opportunity to observe and experience university English classes in China as a guest instructor. There began a long series of work at the music/language nexus, mainly in Japan and Taiwan.
Music in the Classroom in Various Locations
Taiwan: Actions songs and thematic vocabulary reinforcement
With a freshly minted Trinity College TESOL certificate, I flew to Taipei at the turn of the 21st century. Working at a private, bilingual kindergarten in Taoyuan, I was pleasantly surprised by how much music and music-related content was included in lessons. Most prominent was the “action song” whereby children perform synchronous gestures while singing acapella or to a prerecorded CD accompaniment. These songs were mainly used to reinforce key vocabulary in an enjoyable way. A core set of well-known Western melodies such as “Happy Birthday”, “Jingle Bells”, “Twinkle-twinkle”, and “Are You Sleeping?” were drawn on extensively, substituting individual words, or adjusting entire lyrics to fit the language content of the particular lesson. For example, if the theme of the lesson was fruits, the lyric “Happy Birthday to you” might be rendered as “Fresh bananas and pears.” For me, songs such as “Happy Birthday” were directly related to specific situations as part of my first-language life experience (“Jingle Bells” at Christmas time, “Happy Birthday” during birthday parties, etc.) So, I initially found singing the same melodies with reference to starkly different contexts a little unsettling.
I was also very confused by gestures being taught for “Twinkle-twinkle”, which seemed to bear no relationship to the rhythm of the song nor the shape of a star. Later I learned that the students were tracing the Chinese characters for star (星星 Xīngxīng) in the air as they sang the English lyrics; a kind of real-time bilingual oral/literate reinforcement. This, and other experiences such as the extreme reverence and ceremony which guided the in-class eating of a pile of cold hamburgers increased my respect for foreign English teachers abroad, who I began to see as “unwitting ethnographers” grappling with and negotiating intercultural subtleties, even as they grinned, clapping along to “Happy Birthday.” These experiences offered much food for thought when I returned home to study ethnomusicology in graduate school many years later.
Hokkaido: ESP for musicians
My next project involving language and music was the DVD “A Guitarist’s English Masterclass” (日本人ギタリストのための、英語で学ぼう ギター専門用語), an English for specific purposes resource, in 2006. Filmed in Hokkaido, this project teaches specialist classical guitar and general musical terms through scripted one-on-one guitar lessons, each based on one of a series of short pieces which I composed for the project (Guitar Artistry Asia Pacific, 2006). Not long after completing “A Guitarist’s English Masterclass” I returned to New Zealand where I entered graduate school at the University of Canterbury. During this period, while researching the history of the Hispanic plucked-string ensemble, rondalla, I began to work on the article Musicians in the Language Classroom: The Transfer of Musical Skills to Teaching a “Speech Mode of Communication,” eventually published several years later (Rockell & Ocampo, 2014).
Aizu-Wakamatsu: Technology in the classroom and beginning to explore traditional Japanese theatre Noh
Next, explainable only as a surprise sojourn on the journey of life, I found myself working at the University of Aizu, a specialist computer science institution in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima. In two elective courses, “Computer Assisted Ethnomusicology” and “Performance in English” I applied a range of musical approaches, especially endeavoring to involve computers. I did not, however, use music to teach core Speaking and Listening or Reading and Writing courses. Most representative of that period is “Musical looping of lexical chunks: An exploratory study” (Rockell, 2015). Groups of students created interactive group compositions using the Looping app, Loopy, freely building up multiple melodic and rhythmic layers based on short units of language known as lexical chunks. This activity promoted fluency by making the repetition of chunks more enjoyable and aesthetically appealing. Towards the end of my time in Aizu, I began learning Noh, a form of traditional Japanese theatre with a 700-year history, which combines poetry, drama, music, song and dance (Rockell, 2020) with a local teacher. I also joined the Performance in Education SIG (PIE SIG) and collaborated on an English language educational Noh-style play with the founder of the PIE SIG David Kluge, who also contributed two articles to this issue (Rockell, 2020).
Tokyo: Increased Freedom to Maximize Musical Methods
Moving to Tokyo in 2019, I began to explore the relationship between Noh and Zen, and continued to develop English-language Noh-style plays, in the English medium elective classes on Culture (ethnomusicology) and Performance in English. Broadly based on the general structure of traditional Noh, these plays are co-created with students based on themes of their own choosing, and include aspects such as the roles of shite (main actor), waki (supporting actor), and juitai (chorus). They usually have three main sections, jo, ha, and kyu and many of the original English verses students write have syllable patterns based on tanka poetry (5-7-5-7-7). These plays have also featured music, with students variously bringing in violin, saxophone, keyboards and bass over the last several years (Rockell, 2022). In most cases, students have been very reticent at first, but their written feedback and level of participation towards the end of semester have been consistently positive and they often express a reappraisal of or renewed interest in traditional forms such as Noh and a desire to explore them more independently outside of class time (Rockell, 2019).
In Tokyo, too, there has been considerably more freedom in the way core English classes are delivered, and I am now able to use music quite liberally in university level Listening and Speaking classes. Each class includes the first two verses and chorus of three songs. The first song sets the mood and helps students warm up their voices. Here, the aspiration of consonant sounds and quality of lengthened vowels is emphasized, further helping to improve pronunciation. While I readily accept the idea of complex interdependence of spoken and written language in contemporary society as characterized by Ong in Orality and Literacy (Ong 1982), I nevertheless regard sound as having primacy. This may be the result of a personal preference for oral/aural modality and because for most speakers from inner-circle countries, including myself, spoken English is ontogenetically prior to writing. In situations where language is deliberately learned, however, as occurs in Japan, rather than the written script being a practical prompt capturing living language, spoken forms are frequently “figured out” from the text, while the resultant sounds are unconsciously constrained by an L1 “facial set,” or habitual configuration of facial muscles and vocal organs adopted by speakers of a particular language.
I advance the notion that during ordinary speech, vowel length is very short, allowing the speaker, especially a language learner, little chance to set up a feedback loop for adjusting the quality of their vowel sounds. Singing, on the other hand, and the lengthened vowels it encourages, provides just such an opportunity. In my Listening and Speaking classes, the second song is always performed standing and is intended as a cognitive break, while the third is played as students pack up and leave the classroom, only joining in to sing if there is enough class time remaining. The third and final song aims to emphasize aurally a sense of unified closure, linking the lesson psychologically to the one held in the previous week, and retrospectively rendering each 90-minute class session more significant by musical marking its coming to an end. For each of the songs, lyrics are projected on the monitor, and I either play an acoustic accompaniment on the guitar or embed a karaoke-style video in the class PowerPoint. The attitude towards and level of participation in singing has varied from class to class, student to student, and indeed from year to year, especially post-COVID. It would be fair to say, however, that in the main, undergraduate Japanese university students are willing to sing in class and enjoy the activity.
Whenever students read a passage out loud, without fail I emphasize the syllable stress and underlying rhythmic pattern of the language by drumming on an available desk, wall, or white board. This is one way in which music makes language content more attractive and interesting. It aesthetically enhances spoken language aurally in the way illustrations have visually enhanced texts such as the Celtic gospel The Book of Kells as early as 800 AD (Meehan 2018).
Finally, when new vocabulary is introduced and modelled, I improvise a series of arpeggios or block chordal figures using my guitar with the intention of increasing students’ interest and emphasizing specific sonic characteristics of each word. If a particular word or phrase requires attention during the class, I use what I refer to as “immediate melodic reinforcement.” This involves singing the item three times directly after its spoken form appears, always to the same melody, the German Christmas song “O Tannenbaum” (“O Christmas Tree”).
Considering the musical methods I regularly employ, while specialist classical guitar and Japanese Noh training are indispensable to directing English-language Noh and providing instrumental vocabulary support, all the other activities are readily accessible for less musically inclined teachers. A general sense of prosody and syllable stress, and access to a device on which to play recorded music in its many forms would be the only prerequisites.
Conclusion
As a musician, using music in the classroom has always seemed very natural to me, and, in a competitive market, is a way of playing to my strengths and offering a unique contribution. At the same time, on reviewing some of the ways I have used music in the language classroom up till now in various locations, it is clear that they are in line with the general findings on music, mind, and brain referred to earlier. Helping to increase enjoyment, pleasure, and joy in the context of formal study is no small thing, and the same goes for increased motivation and confidence. Moreover, in keeping with the suggestion of Murphey (1990) about music and memory enhancement, almost all of my projects have relied on melodic and/or rhythmic support in teaching thematic vocabulary, lexical chunks, whole text, and any pertinent language that spontaneously arises during class.
As an educational practitioner, I will continue to explore the ever-expanding feast that music in the language classroom offers. At the same time, as I pointed out earlier, there have been insufficient empirical studies that probe the intersection of music, memory, and emotion. I strongly encourage mind and brain researchers to carry out such work and would happily participate, should my practical experience be of any assistance.
Entering 2025, I find my focus increasingly returning to ethnomusicology, and the desire to renew classical guitar performance and teaching. As for language teaching through music, most of my work to date has been Japan-focused, so I am very curious to conduct co-authored restudies of earlier work in other national contexts, such as Korea. Meanwhile, in-class co-creation of English language, educational Noh-style plays incorporating music continues in my classes. And in 2025 I intend to commence an extended “Narrative Disclosures” series, probing discursive behavior in response to live musical performances.
References
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Guitar Artistry Asia Pacific. (2006, November 30). Nihonjin Gitarisuto no tame no, eigo de manabou gitaa senmonyougo [Guitar technical terms to study in English for Japanese guitarists] [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8crRvAUSO0
Guitar Artistry Asia Pacific. (2024, August 2). Kim Rockell classical guitar recital Conservation Hut Blue Mountains [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SI9jBPfAI8
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Kim Rockell is from Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. A member of PIE since 2019, his research interests encompass ethnomusicology and performing arts in education. He is a classical guitarist, and his projects have examined plucked-string traditions, Philippine rondalla and Hispanic musical influences in the Asia Pacific, migrant music and music in diaspora, and the music/language nexus.