Why music? The various potential roles of music in the foreign language classroom

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (Institut fuer Englische Philologie Arbeitsbereich Didaktik des Englischen), course: Kompetenzorientierung im Englischunterricht, language: English, abstract: Music can be an extremely versatile tool for the foreign-language teacher. It has the potential to support and improve learning on a variety of levels: it can activate, motivate, or relax students; it can help memorization of vocabulary or language structures; it can bridge cultural gaps or contribute to the emergence of a learning community; it can have neurological benefits; it can be used as authentic learning material or in the form of a ritual; and so forth. Theoretical and empirical work has been carried out to support these claims-of which many must feel obvious to foreign-language teachers, since music and song are essential parts of human culture and play a significant role part in the language-learning of infants-but these works are scattered across a range of disciplines from anthropology to linguistics or neuroscience and, to the best of the knowledge of the author, cannot be found in collected form in any publication.