This article considers the value of relating music and language in the EFLclassroom. From an ontological point of view, sounds are the roots of bothmusic and speech. Our 'melodic approach' is based on the evidence thatmusicality of speech has an effect not only on the pronunciation skills ofEFL students but also on their entire language acquisition process. Anumber of suggestions are made to provide the teacher with a range ofteaching devices.Hearing is one of the most basic and at the same time enrichingcapacities human beings possess. It is difficult for us to ignore a sound.Visual input can be easily avoided simply by closing our eyes, but we donot have a similar mechanism for 'closing our ears'. It is possible for usnot to 'listen to' something, but we will probably still 'hear' it. We canadapt ourselves to a rhythmic noise, such as the ticking of a clock in aroom, to the point where we are not conscious of it; however, we wouldnotice the silence if it stopped. Taking into consideration the pervasivepower of sound, we propose a melodic approach to language teaching inwhich emphasis is given to the melody of language. In no way are wedenying the importance of visual input, but our focus will be on givinggreater recognition to the beneficial use of modified auditory input in theEFL classroom.The theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983) pointed out thathuman beings, potentially and educationally speaking, have manydifferent intelligences and capacities that could be stimulated in theclassroom. One of the main implications for teaching of this theorywas that students should not only be taught to increase their verbal,spatial, and numerical intelligences, but also to nurture their musical,bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences.Clearly, we learn in different ways, and as learners unconsciouslyestablish our own preferred sensory system. While visual learnersprefer charts, diagrams, and written material, auditory learners likelistening activities, and kinaesthetic learners need to have movement,to be involved physically in much the same way as in drama or roleplaying.In this context the teacher should offer a varied gamut of activities toreach the different types of learners. All the intelligences of our learnersshould be addressed and developed in the classroom, including musicalintelligence, which is highly relevant for language teaching.146 ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000Music and Linguists define language as an instrument for communicative verballanguage interaction. However, the Spanish music therapist, Patxi del Campo(1997), asserts that in any oral interaction only 15% of the informationissued corresponds to verbal language, while 70% of the message isperformed through body language; the final 15% belongs to intonation,the musical character of language. This importance of body language canbe easily observed by watching a television debate with the volumeturned off. The body language clearly indicates the mood and attitude ofthe participants, and even their agreement or disagreement with whatthe other speakers are saying.Music and language share several features. On the one hand, both stemfrom the processing of sounds; on the other, both are used by theirauthors/speakers to convey a message, although language is much moreprecise than music, whose effect is mainly emotional. On another level,music and language have intrinsic features in common, such as pitch,volume, prominence, stress, tone, rhythm, and pauses. Another sharedfeature of language and music is that we learn both of them throughexposure. No language can be acquired without oral or written input (orvisual input, in the case of sign language), and in a similar fashion weacquire our notions of music from what we hear around us—which iswhy music from other cultures often sounds odd to us when it differssignificantly from the patterns of sounds and rhythms to which we havegrown accustomed.Jackendoff (1993) takes for granted that human beings are predisposedfor language, music, and vision. He defines language as the capacity ofcommunicating through words, music as the faculty of perceiving soundpatterns, and vision as the possibility of seeing the external world. Oncewe have a set of abstract patterns in our mind, we analyse any newstimulus by accommodating this additional information to our previousknowledge (Ausubel 1968). Our mental capacities hinge on theconstruction of unconscious patterns in response to visual, linguistic,or musical input, and on our ability to analyse it intuitively.Jackendoff (1992) also speculates that there is an interaction of facultiesto build up our understanding of our environment. Evidence of this canbe seen in an experiment carried out with adult native speakers ofSpanish (Fonseca 1997). The participants were given a picture and askedto tell a story related to it that included a beginning, a climax, and anending. They could choose whether to speak in Spanish or English.Before narrating the same story for a second time, they relaxed bylistening for three minutes to quiet instrumental music that includedwater sounds and birdsong. They were then asked to repeat the samestory they had told some moments ago. The background music was notswitched off while they were speaking, although the volume was turneddown. During the second narration they started verbalizing informationthat had not been coded visually, but rather proceeded from the musicalinput. They included things that were not in the original picture and,taking the position of an omniscient narrator, they talked about theForeign language acquisition and melody singing 147Intuitive melodicapproach in LIacquisition148characters' feelings. In this way, visual, auditory-musical, and emotionalinformation was encoded linguistically.The brain has different ways of processing outside information—differentspecialized devices, different types of intelligences, and therefore,different kinds of memories.
In this connection it is very interesting tonote that psychological and linguistic studies reveal how the interactionbetween music and language acquisition is activated at a very early stage.Research has shown that a foetus perceives acoustic signals in the womb.Not only does it hear its mother's heartbeats, but it also receives sensoryinformation coming from outside the uterus. The neurophysiologist andeducator, Carla Hannaford (1995), describes the studies of Dr AlfredTomatis which show how five-month-old foetuses respond to phonemesof language, that is to say, to varying vibrations of sound such as thevowel sounds:Using fibre optic cameras, Dr. Alfred Tomatis discovered that thefoetus will move a specific muscle, in the arm or leg for example, whenit hears a specific phoneme. The particular muscle moved varies ineach foetus studied, but each time the same phoneme is sounded, thesame muscle will move. This early connection of a muscle response tosound suggests the significance of anchoring sensory input with actionfor learning to occur. This sensory-motor response to phonemesallows the foetus to begin the process of learning language in utero.By twenty-four weeks ... the foetus responds to music by blinking itseyes and moving as though dancing to a beat.(Hannaford 1995: 36)The psychologist P. Hepper concludes after studying the foetalbehaviour before and after birth:that newborns who had been exposed to the theme tune of a popularTV programme during pregnancy exhibited changes in heartrate,number of movements and behavioural state at birth. These effectscould be attributed to prenatal exposure alone and not to postnatalexposure or a genetic disposition, and were specific to the tune learned.(Cited by Odam 1995: 14)Taking into account these neurophysiological and psychological referenceswe could argue that the sound-learning process and its auditorymemory have started before birth, which would mean that soundperception and its analysis are among the earliest processes to develop.Mehler and Dupoux (1992) were interested in discovering the age atwhich a child would be able to recognize its mother tongue. Theyrecorded a perfect French/Russian bilingual speaker telling a story inboth languages. Two groups of French babies were exposed to thestories: a group of four-day-old newborns and a group of two-month-oldinfants. Both groups distinguished their language. Mehler and Dupouxconcluded that four-day-old newborns were capable of distinguishingthe typical melodic contour of their language, but not the words, becauseCarmen Fonseca Morawhen they were exposed to French-sounding sentences but withinvented words, they also recognized it as their language. Linguisticresearch has shown that each language has its own intonation and itsown tonal and rhythmic properties, and that even very young infants aresensitive to these.Discourse intonation, the ordering of pitched sounds made by a humanvoice, is the first thing we learn when we are acquiring a language. Lateron, it is through interaction that a child picks up not only the musicalityof each language, but also the necessary communication skills. In theearliest stage, it is usually the adult who behaves as a model,accommodating her/his speech style to the child's needs, but interactingwith older children (brothers or sisters) also seems to be profitable.The role of 'motherese' appears to be fundamental in the child's processof acquiring a language, not only because of the affective aspects that itoffers, as Wallon (1975) points out, but also because of the particularfeatures of this speech. From the very first moment, mothers tend toconsider their babies as perfectly prepared to understand them (Snow1977). Mother talk, also called parental or caretaker talk, is highlyrepetitive, and full of simple syntactic structures. Slowing down theirspeech production, mothers give an exaggerated intonation to theirutterances, pausing more notarily than in adult-to-adult speech betweenphrases and clauses.Feu and Pinero (1996) recorded the interaction between a Spanish boy,Guillermo, and his mother for four months. They studied the sonorouslinguisticcode established in this interaction and observed the use of atonal-linguistic unit they called 'celula sonora' (voiced cell). Theseauditory units contain syllables where the rhythm of stressed andunstressed vowels conforms to the musical pattern of a word. As anexample, they describe Guillermo's vocalization of the Spanish word'pajaro' (bird). His vocalic production, 'aaaaa-aa-oo' reproduced theternary rhythm and melody of the word.Crystal's (1986) research has also provided evidence that prosodicacquisition precedes speech production:In one child studied at Reading, aged 1; 2, the phrase all-gone, regularlysaid by the parent after each meal, was actually rehearsed by using theprosodic component only: the child hummed the intonation of thephrase first..., only then attempting the whole, producing an accurateintonation but only approximate segments ... The phrase could beeasily elicited after any meal, but it was not until a month had gone bythat the child's segmental output became as stable as his prosodic.(Cited by Singleton 1989: 42)There is also a special use of melodic contours at school. Children arestill involved in the LI acquisition process at the age of three. Feu andPinero (1997) studied teacher talk and also observed the use ofexaggerated intonation patterns by a Spanish teacher in the classroomwhen trying to elicit information from a three-year-old group. ThisForeign language acquisition and melody singing 149Melodic contoursin the EFLclassroomemphatic intonation occurred again when the teacher was explaininghow to do a new or more complicated task.Our direct observation of the discourse of EFL teachers (Fonseca 1997)also reflects this hyperbolic melodic contour, but it only seems to bepresent when s/he is introducing a new structure and having studentsrepeat or when s/he is acting as a linguistic model while correctingstudents' pronunciation.In the use of modified intonation, both mothers and language teachersare acting instinctively. They are unaware of the fact that they are'singing' at that moment. In both cases, they are expecting some type ofrepetition. In the same way that babies answer their mothers tonally,EFL students, when asked to repeat, give back the same melody, even ifthey are unable to pronounce the words correctly. In pairwork activityafterwards, where students have to use the structure just taught, they donot generally use that exaggerated pronunciation because they haveinterpreted it as a pedagogical tool to help them to pronounce better.Music and Singing is an easy way of memorizing something. Most of us canmemory probably remember having learnt the multiplication tables with aspecific tune. Melody seems to act as a path or a cue to evoke the preciseinformation we are trying to retrieve.Tim Murphey (1990) defines the 'song-stuck-in-my-head' phenomenon asa melodic Din, as an (in)voluntary musical and verbal rehearsal. Murpheyalso hypothesizes that the Din could be initiated by subvocal rehearsal.So, for example, we are able to rehear mentally the voice and words of aperson with whom we have had an argument. Similarly, while reading thenotes taken in a lecture, we will probably rehear the lecturer's voice, whileat the same time we can mentally visualize the place from which s/he wastalking and even her/his gestures or body movements.Music seems to leave a particularly deep trace in our memories; thiscould be due to the fact that it is related to affective and unconsciousfactors. It could also be related to the hypothesis that it is less energydemandingbecause musical perception starts before birth.Implicationsfor EFLWith the purpose of following a similar process to that of LI, the EFLteacher of beginners, at the early input stage, could consciously giveemphasis to the melody and prosodic features of the structure, pattern,or expression s/he is presenting. In order to do that, it is necessary totake the statement and to repeat it several times by giving emphasis tothe prominent stresses. By making the rhythmic articulation of theutterance more exaggerated, the intonation becomes more musical. Theselection of initial pitch has to be done by the teacher according to his/her singing abilities. The variation of pitch during the oral production ofthe utterance depends on the speech prosody pattern of each sentence.It is also possible to use a well-known tune. The opening melody ofBeethoven's Fifth Symphony is suitable for questions similar to that of150 Carmen Fonseca Mora'What do you do?' or 'Where are you from?', although it would not beappropriated when asking 'Where do you usually go to have a drink inSpain at five o'clock?' This melodic presentation of a structure has aslower tempo than speech, the syllables are lengthened, and pausesbetween different thought groups become more notable. Teachers adapttheir talk to their students' transitional competence while using thistechnique. The more rhythmic and intonated the utterances we teachare, the more holistic the learning will be. By focusing on rhythm andintonation we help our students to take in the new utterance as a gestalt.By engaging the concentration and motor control of children musically,their attention can be directed away from the tediousness of articulationexercises. Research has also shown that these carrier melodies stimulatethe right hemisphere. When we allow students to repeat, we are giving themmore time to process the new auditory information using their workingmemories. Later, of course, they will need to develop their mental grammarof the foreign language they are learning; more logical-analytical activitiesare essential to help the student to process meaning, usage, and form.For intermediate and advanced students the melodic approach is still auseful technique when teachers try to improve their students'pronunciation abilities (Gilbert 1993 provides us with excellentexamples). Concentrating on the musicality of speech is also a valuablestrategy for the EFL learner in listening comprehension activities.Training students to recognize the mood and attitude of the speakers bypaying attention to their intonation contours allows learners to retrieve acontextual element they are normally deprived of when they arelistening to a tape.In general, the use of music in the language classroom encouragesstudents to be quiet because it avoids other auditory distractions.Therefore, it is especially helpful to create the relaxing classroomatmosphere needed to develop written composition activities. Music hasthe ability to change the hearer's mood because it stimulates ourimagination. Songs are also useful. Students improve their pronunciationskills while singing, but at the same time the repetitive lyrics in songshave a positive effect on the students' language acquisition level. Songscan be easily remembered, and are therefore an effective way ofproviding students with lexical patterns that are stored in their mindsand that can be effortlessly retrieved during any oral interaction.Expressions such as, for example, 'It never rains in Southern California'or 'Didn't we almost have it all?', also help EFL students to have ahandy model in their minds to deduce grammatical information such as—in this case—the position of the adverb.One of the problems of EFL students is that once the English lesson isover they have not got many possibilities of receiving aural input in theforeign language. Yet students love doing activities related to music intheir freetime. When asked about their hobbies, listening to music,singing, dancing, or playing an instrument are very common answers. Itis possible to sing and even to remember the lyrics in a language oneForeign language acquisition and melody singing 151does not know at all. Probably everyone can remember a song learnt asa child, the meaning of which did not become clear till some years later.We can encourage students to take advantage of this handy andmotivating source of aural input in English.It can be argued that using a musical approach at the input stage willaccomplish several goals: first, verbal practice associated to musicalinformation seems to be more memorable; second, allowing students togive a choral melodic repetition of the new language just taught lowerstheir anxiety filter; and third, by strengthening their musical memory,the appropriate foreign sounds will be stored in the students' long-termmemory, and thus be accessible for subvocal rehearsal.From a more general point of view, music and musicality of speech inlanguage teaching provide a rich-sounding environment. This meansthat the melodic approach is at least a plausible educational alternativethat enhances the EFL learners' awareness of sounds, rhythms, pauses,and intonations. But its use can also be interpreted as an indicator ofhow much teachers cater for the needs and interests of their students.Received May 1999ReferencesAusubel, D. A. 1968. Educational Psychology: ACognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston.Del Campo, P. 1997. La musica como procesohumano. Salamanca: Amaru Ediciones.Feu Guijarro, M. J. and E. Pifiero Gil. 1996. Elmundo sonoro y la adquisicion del lenguaje'.Revista Musica, Arte y Proceso 2: 38-49.Fonseca Mora, C. 1997. 'Music, language andmind: foreign language acquisition throughsinging'. Paper presented at I Congreso Internationalde Estudios Ingleses, University ofAlmeria, Spain.Fonseca Mora, C. 1999. 'El papel de la musicalidaddel lenguaje en el proceso de adquisiciondel ingles como L2'. Unpublished PhD Thesis,University of Huelva.Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind. New York:Basic Books.Gilbert, J. B. 1993. Clear Speech. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Hannaford, C. 1995. Smart Moves. Virginia: GreatOcean Publishers.Jackendoff, R. 1992. Languages of the Mind.Essays on Mental Representations. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press.Jackendoff, R. 1993. Patterns in the Mind. Exeter:Harvester Wheatsheaf.Mehler, J. and E. Dupoux. 1992. Nacer sabiendo.Introduccion al Desarrollo Cognitivo del Hombre.Madrid: Alianza.Murphey, T. 1990. 'The Song stuck in my headphenomenon: a melodic Din in the LAD?'System 18/1: 53-64.Odam, G. 1995. The Sounding Symbol. MusicEducation in Action. Cheltenham: Stanley Thorne.Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. London:Penguin.Singleton, D. 1989. Language Acquisition. TheAge Factor. Clevedon/Philadelphia: MultilingualMatters.Snow, C. 1977. 'The development of conversationbetween mothers and babies'. Journal of ChildLanguage 4: 1-22.Wallon, H. 1975. Los Origenes del cardcter en elNino. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visidn.The authorCarmen Fonseca Mora teaches English at theUniversity of Huelva in Spain. Her research is inthe area of the relationship between language andmusic in the EFL classroom. She has worked as aprimary teacher and as a teacher trainer in Spain.Her current interests include the acquisition ofprosody in LI and L2, self-access learning, and theteaching of oral skills.Email <fonseca@uhu.es>152 Carmen Fonseca Moraand melody singingIntroductionVariety oflearning stylesThis article considers the value of relating music and language in the EFLclassroom. From an ontological point of view, sounds are the roots of bothmusic and speech. Our 'melodic approach' is based on the evidence thatmusicality of speech has an effect not only on the pronunciation skills ofEFL students but also on their entire language acquisition process. Anumber of suggestions are made to provide the teacher with a range ofteaching devices.Hearing is one of the most basic and at the same time enrichingcapacities human beings possess. It is difficult for us to ignore a sound.Visual input can be easily avoided simply by closing our eyes, but we donot have a similar mechanism for 'closing our ears'. It is possible for usnot to 'listen to' something, but we will probably still 'hear' it. We canadapt ourselves to a rhythmic noise, such as the ticking of a clock in aroom, to the point where we are not conscious of it; however, we wouldnotice the silence if it stopped. Taking into consideration the pervasivepower of sound, we propose a melodic approach to language teaching inwhich emphasis is given to the melody of language. In no way are wedenying the importance of visual input, but our focus will be on givinggreater recognition to the beneficial use of modified auditory input in theEFL classroom.The theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983) pointed out thathuman beings, potentially and educationally speaking, have manydifferent intelligences and capacities that could be stimulated in theclassroom. One of the main implications for teaching of this theorywas that students should not only be taught to increase their verbal,spatial, and numerical intelligences, but also to nurture their musical,bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences.Clearly, we learn in different ways, and as learners unconsciouslyestablish our own preferred sensory system. While visual learnersprefer charts, diagrams, and written material, auditory learners likelistening activities, and kinaesthetic learners need to have movement,to be involved physically in much the same way as in drama or roleplaying.In this context the teacher should offer a varied gamut of activities toreach the different types of learners. All the intelligences of our learnersshould be addressed and developed in the classroom, including musicalintelligence, which is highly relevant for language teaching.146 ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000Music and Linguists define language as an instrument for communicative verballanguage interaction. However, the Spanish music therapist, Patxi del Campo(1997), asserts that in any oral interaction only 15% of the informationissued corresponds to verbal language, while 70% of the message isperformed through body language; the final 15% belongs to intonation,the musical character of language. This importance of body language canbe easily observed by watching a television debate with the volumeturned off. The body language clearly indicates the mood and attitude ofthe participants, and even their agreement or disagreement with whatthe other speakers are saying.Music and language share several features. On the one hand, both stemfrom the processing of sounds; on the other, both are used by theirauthors/speakers to convey a message, although language is much moreprecise than music, whose effect is mainly emotional. On another level,music and language have intrinsic features in common, such as pitch,volume, prominence, stress, tone, rhythm, and pauses. Another sharedfeature of language and music is that we learn both of them throughexposure. No language can be acquired without oral or written input (orvisual input, in the case of sign language), and in a similar fashion weacquire our notions of music from what we hear around us—which iswhy music from other cultures often sounds odd to us when it differssignificantly from the patterns of sounds and rhythms to which we havegrown accustomed.Jackendoff (1993) takes for granted that human beings are predisposedfor language, music, and vision. He defines language as the capacity ofcommunicating through words, music as the faculty of perceiving soundpatterns, and vision as the possibility of seeing the external world. Oncewe have a set of abstract patterns in our mind, we analyse any newstimulus by accommodating this additional information to our previousknowledge (Ausubel 1968). Our mental capacities hinge on theconstruction of unconscious patterns in response to visual, linguistic,or musical input, and on our ability to analyse it intuitively.Jackendoff (1992) also speculates that there is an interaction of facultiesto build up our understanding of our environment. Evidence of this canbe seen in an experiment carried out with adult native speakers ofSpanish (Fonseca 1997). The participants were given a picture and askedto tell a story related to it that included a beginning, a climax, and anending. They could choose whether to speak in Spanish or English.Before narrating the same story for a second time, they relaxed bylistening for three minutes to quiet instrumental music that includedwater sounds and birdsong. They were then asked to repeat the samestory they had told some moments ago. The background music was notswitched off while they were speaking, although the volume was turneddown. During the second narration they started verbalizing informationthat had not been coded visually, but rather proceeded from the musicalinput. They included things that were not in the original picture and,taking the position of an omniscient narrator, they talked about theForeign language acquisition and melody singing 147Intuitive melodicapproach in LIacquisition148characters' feelings. In this way, visual, auditory-musical, and emotionalinformation was encoded linguistically.The brain has different ways of processing outside information—differentspecialized devices, different types of intelligences, and therefore,different kinds of memories. In this connection it is very interesting tonote that psychological and linguistic studies reveal how the interactionbetween music and language acquisition is activated at a very early stage.Research has shown that a foetus perceives acoustic signals in the womb.Not only does it hear its mother's heartbeats, but it also receives sensoryinformation coming from outside the uterus. The neurophysiologist andeducator, Carla Hannaford (1995), describes the studies of Dr AlfredTomatis which show how five-month-old foetuses respond to phonemesof language, that is to say, to varying vibrations of sound such as thevowel sounds:Using fibre optic cameras, Dr. Alfred Tomatis discovered that thefoetus will move a specific muscle, in the arm or leg for example, whenit hears a specific phoneme. The particular muscle moved varies ineach foetus studied, but each time the same phoneme is sounded, thesame muscle will move. This early connection of a muscle response tosound suggests the significance of anchoring sensory input with actionfor learning to occur. This sensory-motor response to phonemesallows the foetus to begin the process of learning language in utero.By twenty-four weeks ... the foetus responds to music by blinking itseyes and moving as though dancing to a beat.(Hannaford 1995: 36)The psychologist P. Hepper concludes after studying the foetalbehaviour before and after birth:that newborns who had been exposed to the theme tune of a popularTV programme during pregnancy exhibited changes in heartrate,number of movements and behavioural state at birth. These effectscould be attributed to prenatal exposure alone and not to postnatalexposure or a genetic disposition, and were specific to the tune learned.(Cited by Odam 1995: 14)Taking into account these neurophysiological and psychological referenceswe could argue that the sound-learning process and its auditorymemory have started before birth, which would mean that soundperception and its analysis are among the earliest processes to develop.Mehler and Dupoux (1992) were interested in discovering the age atwhich a child would be able to recognize its mother tongue. Theyrecorded a perfect French/Russian bilingual speaker telling a story inboth languages. Two groups of French babies were exposed to thestories: a group of four-day-old newborns and a group of two-month-oldinfants. Both groups distinguished their language. Mehler and Dupouxconcluded that four-day-old newborns were capable of distinguishingthe typical melodic contour of their language, but not the words, becauseCarmen Fonseca Morawhen they were exposed to French-sounding sentences but withinvented words, they also recognized it as their language. Linguisticresearch has shown that each language has its own intonation and itsown tonal and rhythmic properties, and that even very young infants aresensitive to these.Discourse intonation, the ordering of pitched sounds made by a humanvoice, is the first thing we learn when we are acquiring a language. Lateron, it is through interaction that a child picks up not only the musicalityof each language, but also the necessary communication skills. In theearliest stage, it is usually the adult who behaves as a model,accommodating her/his speech style to the child's needs, but interactingwith older children (brothers or sisters) also seems to be profitable.The role of 'motherese' appears to be fundamental in the child's processof acquiring a language, not only because of the affective aspects that itoffers, as Wallon (1975) points out, but also because of the particularfeatures of this speech. From the very first moment, mothers tend toconsider their babies as perfectly prepared to understand them (Snow1977). Mother talk, also called parental or caretaker talk, is highlyrepetitive, and full of simple syntactic structures. Slowing down theirspeech production, mothers give an exaggerated intonation to theirutterances, pausing more notarily than in adult-to-adult speech betweenphrases and clauses.Feu and Pinero (1996) recorded the interaction between a Spanish boy,Guillermo, and his mother for four months. They studied the sonorouslinguisticcode established in this interaction and observed the use of atonal-linguistic unit they called 'celula sonora' (voiced cell). Theseauditory units contain syllables where the rhythm of stressed andunstressed vowels conforms to the musical pattern of a word. As anexample, they describe Guillermo's vocalization of the Spanish word'pajaro' (bird). His vocalic production, 'aaaaa-aa-oo' reproduced theternary rhythm and melody of the word.Crystal's (1986) research has also provided evidence that prosodicacquisition precedes speech production:In one child studied at Reading, aged 1; 2, the phrase all-gone, regularlysaid by the parent after each meal, was actually rehearsed by using theprosodic component only: the child hummed the intonation of thephrase first..., only then attempting the whole, producing an accurateintonation but only approximate segments ... The phrase could beeasily elicited after any meal, but it was not until a month had gone bythat the child's segmental output became as stable as his prosodic.(Cited by Singleton 1989: 42)There is also a special use of melodic contours at school. Children arestill involved in the LI acquisition process at the age of three. Feu andPinero (1997) studied teacher talk and also observed the use ofexaggerated intonation patterns by a Spanish teacher in the classroomwhen trying to elicit information from a three-year-old group. ThisForeign language acquisition and melody singing 149Melodic contoursin the EFLclassroomemphatic intonation occurred again when the teacher was explaininghow to do a new or more complicated task.Our direct observation of the discourse of EFL teachers (Fonseca 1997)also reflects this hyperbolic melodic contour, but it only seems to bepresent when s/he is introducing a new structure and having studentsrepeat or when s/he is acting as a linguistic model while correctingstudents' pronunciation.In the use of modified intonation, both mothers and language teachersare acting instinctively. They are unaware of the fact that they are'singing' at that moment. In both cases, they are expecting some type ofrepetition. In the same way that babies answer their mothers tonally,EFL students, when asked to repeat, give back the same melody, even ifthey are unable to pronounce the words correctly. In pairwork activityafterwards, where students have to use the structure just taught, they donot generally use that exaggerated pronunciation because they haveinterpreted it as a pedagogical tool to help them to pronounce better.Music and Singing is an easy way of memorizing something. Most of us canmemory probably remember having learnt the multiplication tables with aspecific tune. Melody seems to act as a path or a cue to evoke the preciseinformation we are trying to retrieve.Tim Murphey (1990) defines the 'song-stuck-in-my-head' phenomenon asa melodic Din, as an (in)voluntary musical and verbal rehearsal. Murpheyalso hypothesizes that the Din could be initiated by subvocal rehearsal.So, for example, we are able to rehear mentally the voice and words of aperson with whom we have had an argument. Similarly, while reading thenotes taken in a lecture, we will probably rehear the lecturer's voice, whileat the same time we can mentally visualize the place from which s/he wastalking and even her/his gestures or body movements.Music seems to leave a particularly deep trace in our memories; thiscould be due to the fact that it is related to affective and unconsciousfactors. It could also be related to the hypothesis that it is less energydemandingbecause musical perception starts before birth.Implicationsfor EFLWith the purpose of following a similar process to that of LI, the EFLteacher of beginners, at the early input stage, could consciously giveemphasis to the melody and prosodic features of the structure, pattern,or expression s/he is presenting. In order to do that, it is necessary totake the statement and to repeat it several times by giving emphasis tothe prominent stresses. By making the rhythmic articulation of theutterance more exaggerated, the intonation becomes more musical. Theselection of initial pitch has to be done by the teacher according to his/her singing abilities. The variation of pitch during the oral production ofthe utterance depends on the speech prosody pattern of each sentence.It is also possible to use a well-known tune. The opening melody ofBeethoven's Fifth Symphony is suitable for questions similar to that of150 Carmen Fonseca Mora'What do you do?' or 'Where are you from?', although it would not beappropriated when asking 'Where do you usually go to have a drink inSpain at five o'clock?' This melodic presentation of a structure has aslower tempo than speech, the syllables are lengthened, and pausesbetween different thought groups become more notable. Teachers adapttheir talk to their students' transitional competence while using thistechnique. The more rhythmic and intonated the utterances we teachare, the more holistic the learning will be. By focusing on rhythm andintonation we help our students to take in the new utterance as a gestalt.By engaging the concentration and motor control of children musically,their attention can be directed away from the tediousness of articulationexercises. Research has also shown that these carrier melodies stimulatethe right hemisphere. When we allow students to repeat, we are giving themmore time to process the new auditory information using their workingmemories. Later, of course, they will need to develop their mental grammarof the foreign language they are learning; more logical-analytical activitiesare essential to help the student to process meaning, usage, and form.For intermediate and advanced students the melodic approach is still auseful technique when teachers try to improve their students'pronunciation abilities (Gilbert 1993 provides us with excellentexamples). Concentrating on the musicality of speech is also a valuablestrategy for the EFL learner in listening comprehension activities.Training students to recognize the mood and attitude of the speakers bypaying attention to their intonation contours allows learners to retrieve acontextual element they are normally deprived of when they arelistening to a tape.In general, the use of music in the language classroom encouragesstudents to be quiet because it avoids other auditory distractions.Therefore, it is especially helpful to create the relaxing classroomatmosphere needed to develop written composition activities. Music hasthe ability to change the hearer's mood because it stimulates ourimagination. Songs are also useful. Students improve their pronunciationskills while singing, but at the same time the repetitive lyrics in songshave a positive effect on the students' language acquisition level. Songscan be easily remembered, and are therefore an effective way ofproviding students with lexical patterns that are stored in their mindsand that can be effortlessly retrieved during any oral interaction.Expressions such as, for example, 'It never rains in Southern California'or 'Didn't we almost have it all?', also help EFL students to have ahandy model in their minds to deduce grammatical information such as—in this case—the position of the adverb.One of the problems of EFL students is that once the English lesson isover they have not got many possibilities of receiving aural input in theforeign language. Yet students love doing activities related to music intheir freetime. When asked about their hobbies, listening to music,singing, dancing, or playing an instrument are very common answers. Itis possible to sing and even to remember the lyrics in a language oneForeign language acquisition and melody singing 151does not know at all. Probably everyone can remember a song learnt asa child, the meaning of which did not become clear till some years later.We can encourage students to take advantage of this handy andmotivating source of aural input in English.It can be argued that using a musical approach at the input stage willaccomplish several goals: first, verbal practice associated to musicalinformation seems to be more memorable; second, allowing students togive a choral melodic repetition of the new language just taught lowerstheir anxiety filter; and third, by strengthening their musical memory,the appropriate foreign sounds will be stored in the students' long-termmemory, and thus be accessible for subvocal rehearsal.From a more general point of view, music and musicality of speech inlanguage teaching provide a rich-sounding environment. This meansthat the melodic approach is at least a plausible educational alternativethat enhances the EFL learners' awareness of sounds, rhythms, pauses,and intonations. But its use can also be interpreted as an indicator ofhow much teachers cater for the needs and interests of their students.Received May 1999ReferencesAusubel, D. A. 1968. Educational Psychology: ACognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston.Del Campo, P. 1997. La musica como procesohumano. Salamanca: Amaru Ediciones.Feu Guijarro, M. J. and E. Pifiero Gil. 1996. Elmundo sonoro y la adquisicion del lenguaje'.Revista Musica, Arte y Proceso 2: 38-49.Fonseca Mora, C. 1997. 'Music, language andmind: foreign language acquisition throughsinging'. Paper presented at I Congreso Internationalde Estudios Ingleses, University ofAlmeria, Spain.Fonseca Mora, C. 1999. 'El papel de la musicalidaddel lenguaje en el proceso de adquisiciondel ingles como L2'. Unpublished PhD Thesis,University of Huelva.Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind. New York:Basic Books.Gilbert, J. B. 1993. Clear Speech. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Hannaford, C. 1995. Smart Moves. Virginia: GreatOcean Publishers.Jackendoff, R. 1992. Languages of the Mind.Essays on Mental Representations. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press.Jackendoff, R. 1993. Patterns in the Mind. Exeter:Harvester Wheatsheaf.Mehler, J. and E. Dupoux. 1992. Nacer sabiendo.Introduccion al Desarrollo Cognitivo del Hombre.Madrid: Alianza.Murphey, T. 1990. 'The Song stuck in my headphenomenon: a melodic Din in the LAD?'System 18/1: 53-64.Odam, G. 1995. The Sounding Symbol. MusicEducation in Action. Cheltenham: Stanley Thorne.Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. London:Penguin.Singleton, D. 1989. Language Acquisition. TheAge Factor. Clevedon/Philadelphia: MultilingualMatters.Snow, C. 1977. 'The development of conversationbetween mothers and babies'. Journal of ChildLanguage 4: 1-22.Wallon, H. 1975. Los Origenes del cardcter en elNino. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visidn.The authorCarmen Fonseca Mora teaches English at theUniversity of Huelva in Spain. Her research is inthe area of the relationship between language andmusic in the EFL classroom. She has worked as aprimary teacher and as a teacher trainer in Spain.Her current interests include the acquisition ofprosody in LI and L2, self-access learning, and theteaching of oral skills.Email <fonseca@uhu.es>152 Carmen Fonseca Moraand melody singingIntroductionVariety oflearning stylesThis article considers the value of relating music and language in the EFLclassroom. From an ontological point of view, sounds are the roots of bothmusic and speech. Our 'melodic approach' is based on the evidence thatmusicality of speech has an effect not only on the pronunciation skills ofEFL students but also on their entire language acquisition process. Anumber of suggestions are made to provide the teacher with a range ofteaching devices.Hearing is one of the most basic and at the same time enrichingcapacities human beings possess. It is difficult for us to ignore a sound.Visual input can be easily avoided simply by closing our eyes, but we donot have a similar mechanism for 'closing our ears'. It is possible for usnot to 'listen to' something, but we will probably still 'hear' it. We canadapt ourselves to a rhythmic noise, such as the ticking of a clock in aroom, to the point where we are not conscious of it; however, we wouldnotice the silence if it stopped. Taking into consideration the pervasivepower of sound, we propose a melodic approach to language teaching inwhich emphasis is given to the melody of language. In no way are wedenying the importance of visual input, but our focus will be on givinggreater recognition to the beneficial use of modified auditory input in theEFL classroom.The theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983) pointed out thathuman beings, potentially and educationally speaking, have manydifferent intelligences and capacities that could be stimulated in theclassroom. One of the main implications for teaching of this theorywas that students should not only be taught to increase their verbal,spatial, and numerical intelligences, but also to nurture their musical,bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences.Clearly, we learn in different ways, and as learners unconsciouslyestablish our own preferred sensory system. While visual learnersprefer charts, diagrams, and written material, auditory learners likelistening activities, and kinaesthetic learners need to have movement,to be involved physically in much the same way as in drama or roleplaying.In this context the teacher should offer a varied gamut of activities toreach the different types of learners. All the intelligences of our learnersshould be addressed and developed in the classroom, including musicalintelligence, which is highly relevant for language teaching.146 ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000Music and Linguists define language as an instrument for communicative verballanguage interaction. However, the Spanish music therapist, Patxi del Campo(1997), asserts that in any oral interaction only 15% of the informationissued corresponds to verbal language, while 70% of the message isperformed through body language; the final 15% belongs to intonation,the musical character of language. This importance of body language canbe easily observed by watching a television debate with the volumeturned off. The body language clearly indicates the mood and attitude ofthe participants, and even their agreement or disagreement with whatthe other speakers are saying.Music and language share several features. On the one hand, both stemfrom the processing of sounds; on the other, both are used by theirauthors/speakers to convey a message, although language is much moreprecise than music, whose effect is mainly emotional. On another level,music and language have intrinsic features in common, such as pitch,volume, prominence, stress, tone, rhythm, and pauses. Another sharedfeature of language and music is that we learn both of them throughexposure. No language can be acquired without oral or written input (orvisual input, in the case of sign language), and in a similar fashion weacquire our notions of music from what we hear around us—which iswhy music from other cultures often sounds odd to us when it differssignificantly from the patterns of sounds and rhythms to which we havegrown accustomed.Jackendoff (1993) takes for granted that human beings are predisposedfor language, music, and vision. He defines language as the capacity ofcommunicating through words, music as the faculty of perceiving soundpatterns, and vision as the possibility of seeing the external world. Oncewe have a set of abstract patterns in our mind, we analyse any newstimulus by accommodating this additional information to our previousknowledge (Ausubel 1968). Our mental capacities hinge on theconstruction of unconscious patterns in response to visual, linguistic,or musical input, and on our ability to analyse it intuitively.Jackendoff (1992) also speculates that there is an interaction of facultiesto build up our understanding of our environment. Evidence of this canbe seen in an experiment carried out with adult native speakers ofSpanish (Fonseca 1997). The participants were given a picture and askedto tell a story related to it that included a beginning, a climax, and anending. They could choose whether to speak in Spanish or English.Before narrating the same story for a second time, they relaxed bylistening for three minutes to quiet instrumental music that includedwater sounds and birdsong. They were then asked to repeat the samestory they had told some moments ago. The background music was notswitched off while they were speaking, although the volume was turneddown. During the second narration they started verbalizing informationthat had not been coded visually, but rather proceeded from the musicalinput. They included things that were not in the original picture and,taking the position of an omniscient narrator, they talked about theForeign language acquisition and melody singing 147Intuitive melodicapproach in LIacquisition148characters' feelings. In this way, visual, auditory-musical, and emotionalinformation was encoded linguistically.The brain has different ways of processing outside information—differentspecialized devices, different types of intelligences, and therefore,different kinds of memories. In this connection it is very interesting tonote that psychological and linguistic studies reveal how the interactionbetween music and language acquisition is activated at a very early stage.Research has shown that a foetus perceives acoustic signals in the womb.Not only does it hear its mother's heartbeats, but it also receives sensoryinformation coming from outside the uterus. The neurophysiologist andeducator, Carla Hannaford (1995), describes the studies of Dr AlfredTomatis which show how five-month-old foetuses respond to phonemesof language, that is to say, to varying vibrations of sound such as thevowel sounds:Using fibre optic cameras, Dr. Alfred Tomatis discovered that thefoetus will move a specific muscle, in the arm or leg for example, whenit hears a specific phoneme. The particular muscle moved varies ineach foetus studied, but each time the same phoneme is sounded, thesame muscle will move. This early connection of a muscle response tosound suggests the significance of anchoring sensory input with actionfor learning to occur. This sensory-motor response to phonemesallows the foetus to begin the process of learning language in utero.By twenty-four weeks ... the foetus responds to music by blinking itseyes and moving as though dancing to a beat.(Hannaford 1995: 36)The psychologist P. Hepper concludes after studying the foetalbehaviour before and after birth:that newborns who had been exposed to the theme tune of a popularTV programme during pregnancy exhibited changes in heartrate,number of movements and behavioural state at birth. These effectscould be attributed to prenatal exposure alone and not to postnatalexposure or a genetic disposition, and were specific to the tune learned.(Cited by Odam 1995: 14)Taking into account these neurophysiological and psychological referenceswe could argue that the sound-learning process and its auditorymemory have started before birth, which would mean that soundperception and its analysis are among the earliest processes to develop.Mehler and Dupoux (1992) were interested in discovering the age atwhich a child would be able to recognize its mother tongue. Theyrecorded a perfect French/Russian bilingual speaker telling a story inboth languages. Two groups of French babies were exposed to thestories: a group of four-day-old newborns and a group of two-month-oldinfants. Both groups distinguished their language. Mehler and Dupouxconcluded that four-day-old newborns were capable of distinguishingthe typical melodic contour of their language, but not the words, becauseCarmen Fonseca Morawhen they were exposed to French-sounding sentences but withinvented words, they also recognized it as their language. Linguisticresearch has shown that each language has its own intonation and itsown tonal and rhythmic properties, and that even very young infants aresensitive to these.Discourse intonation, the ordering of pitched sounds made by a humanvoice, is the first thing we learn when we are acquiring a language. Lateron, it is through interaction that a child picks up not only the musicalityof each language, but also the necessary communication skills. In theearliest stage, it is usually the adult who behaves as a model,accommodating her/his speech style to the child's needs, but interactingwith older children (brothers or sisters) also seems to be profitable.The role of 'motherese' appears to be fundamental in the child's processof acquiring a language, not only because of the affective aspects that itoffers, as Wallon (1975) points out, but also because of the particularfeatures of this speech. From the very first moment, mothers tend toconsider their babies as perfectly prepared to understand them (Snow1977). Mother talk, also called parental or caretaker talk, is highlyrepetitive, and full of simple syntactic structures. Slowing down theirspeech production, mothers give an exaggerated intonation to theirutterances, pausing more notarily than in adult-to-adult speech betweenphrases and clauses.Feu and Pinero (1996) recorded the interaction between a Spanish boy,Guillermo, and his mother for four months. They studied the sonorouslinguisticcode established in this interaction and observed the use of atonal-linguistic unit they called 'celula sonora' (voiced cell). Theseauditory units contain syllables where the rhythm of stressed andunstressed vowels conforms to the musical pattern of a word. As anexample, they describe Guillermo's vocalization of the Spanish word'pajaro' (bird). His vocalic production, 'aaaaa-aa-oo' reproduced theternary rhythm and melody of the word.Crystal's (1986) research has also provided evidence that prosodicacquisition precedes speech production:In one child studied at Reading, aged 1; 2, the phrase all-gone, regularlysaid by the parent after each meal, was actually rehearsed by using theprosodic component only: the child hummed the intonation of thephrase first..., only then attempting the whole, producing an accurateintonation but only approximate segments ... The phrase could beeasily elicited after any meal, but it was not until a month had gone bythat the child's segmental output became as stable as his prosodic.(Cited by Singleton 1989: 42)There is also a special use of melodic contours at school. Children arestill involved in the LI acquisition process at the age of three. Feu andPinero (1997) studied teacher talk and also observed the use ofexaggerated intonation patterns by a Spanish teacher in the classroomwhen trying to elicit information from a three-year-old group. ThisForeign language acquisition and melody singing 149Melodic contoursin the EFLclassroomemphatic intonation occurred again when the teacher was explaininghow to do a new or more complicated task.Our direct observation of the discourse of EFL teachers (Fonseca 1997)also reflects this hyperbolic melodic contour, but it only seems to bepresent when s/he is introducing a new structure and having studentsrepeat or when s/he is acting as a linguistic model while correctingstudents' pronunciation.In the use of modified intonation, both mothers and language teachersare acting instinctively. They are unaware of the fact that they are'singing' at that moment. In both cases, they are expecting some type ofrepetition. In the same way that babies answer their mothers tonally,EFL students, when asked to repeat, give back the same melody, even ifthey are unable to pronounce the words correctly. In pairwork activityafterwards, where students have to use the structure just taught, they donot generally use that exaggerated pronunciation because they haveinterpreted it as a pedagogical tool to help them to pronounce better.Music and Singing is an easy way of memorizing something. Most of us canmemory probably remember having learnt the multiplication tables with aspecific tune. Melody seems to act as a path or a cue to evoke the preciseinformation we are trying to retrieve.Tim Murphey (1990) defines the 'song-stuck-in-my-head' phenomenon asa melodic Din, as an (in)voluntary musical and verbal rehearsal. Murpheyalso hypothesizes that the Din could be initiated by subvocal rehearsal.So, for example, we are able to rehear mentally the voice and words of aperson with whom we have had an argument. Similarly, while reading thenotes taken in a lecture, we will probably rehear the lecturer's voice, whileat the same time we can mentally visualize the place from which s/he wastalking and even her/his gestures or body movements.Music seems to leave a particularly deep trace in our memories; thiscould be due to the fact that it is related to affective and unconsciousfactors. It could also be related to the hypothesis that it is less energydemandingbecause musical perception starts before birth.Implicationsfor EFLWith the purpose of following a similar process to that of LI, the EFLteacher of beginners, at the early input stage, could consciously giveemphasis to the melody and prosodic features of the structure, pattern,or expression s/he is presenting. In order to do that, it is necessary totake the statement and to repeat it several times by giving emphasis tothe prominent stresses. By making the rhythmic articulation of theutterance more exaggerated, the intonation becomes more musical. Theselection of initial pitch has to be done by the teacher according to his/her singing abilities. The variation of pitch during the oral production ofthe utterance depends on the speech prosody pattern of each sentence.It is also possible to use a well-known tune. The opening melody ofBeethoven's Fifth Symphony is suitable for questions similar to that of150 Carmen Fonseca Mora'What do you do?' or 'Where are you from?', although it would not beappropriated when asking 'Where do you usually go to have a drink inSpain at five o'clock?' This melodic presentation of a structure has aslower tempo than speech, the syllables are lengthened, and pausesbetween different thought groups become more notable. Teachers adapttheir talk to their students' transitional competence while using thistechnique. The more rhythmic and intonated the utterances we teachare, the more holistic the learning will be. By focusing on rhythm andintonation we help our students to take in the new utterance as a gestalt.By engaging the concentration and motor control of children musically,their attention can be directed away from the tediousness of articulationexercises. Research has also shown that these carrier melodies stimulatethe right hemisphere. When we allow students to repeat, we are giving themmore time to process the new auditory information using their workingmemories. Later, of course, they will need to develop their mental grammarof the foreign language they are learning; more logical-analytical activitiesare essential to help the student to process meaning, usage, and form.For intermediate and advanced students the melodic approach is still auseful technique when teachers try to improve their students'pronunciation abilities (Gilbert 1993 provides us with excellentexamples). Concentrating on the musicality of speech is also a valuablestrategy for the EFL learner in listening comprehension activities.Training students to recognize the mood and attitude of the speakers bypaying attention to their intonation contours allows learners to retrieve acontextual element they are normally deprived of when they arelistening to a tape.In general, the use of music in the language classroom encouragesstudents to be quiet because it avoids other auditory distractions.Therefore, it is especially helpful to create the relaxing classroomatmosphere needed to develop written composition activities. Music hasthe ability to change the hearer's mood because it stimulates ourimagination. Songs are also useful. Students improve their pronunciationskills while singing, but at the same time the repetitive lyrics in songshave a positive effect on the students' language acquisition level. Songscan be easily remembered, and are therefore an effective way ofproviding students with lexical patterns that are stored in their mindsand that can be effortlessly retrieved during any oral interaction.Expressions such as, for example, 'It never rains in Southern California'or 'Didn't we almost have it all?', also help EFL students to have ahandy model in their minds to deduce grammatical information such as—in this case—the position of the adverb.One of the problems of EFL students is that once the English lesson isover they have not got many possibilities of receiving aural input in theforeign language. Yet students love doing activities related to music intheir freetime. When asked about their hobbies, listening to music,singing, dancing, or playing an instrument are very common answers. Itis possible to sing and even to remember the lyrics in a language oneForeign language acquisition and melody singing 151does not know at all. Probably everyone can remember a song learnt asa child, the meaning of which did not become clear till some years later.We can encourage students to take advantage of this handy andmotivating source of aural input in English.It can be argued that using a musical approach at the input stage willaccomplish several goals: first, verbal practice associated to musicalinformation seems to be more memorable; second, allowing students togive a choral melodic repetition of the new language just taught lowerstheir anxiety filter; and third, by strengthening their musical memory,the appropriate foreign sounds will be stored in the students' long-termmemory, and thus be accessible for subvocal rehearsal.From a more general point of view, music and musicality of speech inlanguage teaching provide a rich-sounding environment. This meansthat the melodic approach is at least a plausible educational alternativethat enhances the EFL learners' awareness of sounds, rhythms, pauses,and intonations. But its use can also be interpreted as an indicator ofhow much teachers cater for the needs and interests of their students.Received May 1999ReferencesAusubel, D. A. 1968. Educational Psychology: ACognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston.Del Campo, P. 1997. La musica como procesohumano. Salamanca: Amaru Ediciones.Feu Guijarro, M. J. and E. Pifiero Gil. 1996. Elmundo sonoro y la adquisicion del lenguaje'.Revista Musica, Arte y Proceso 2: 38-49.Fonseca Mora, C. 1997. 'Music, language andmind: foreign language acquisition throughsinging'. Paper presented at I Congreso Internationalde Estudios Ingleses, University ofAlmeria, Spain.Fonseca Mora, C. 1999. 'El papel de la musicalidaddel lenguaje en el proceso de adquisiciondel ingles como L2'. Unpublished PhD Thesis,University of Huelva.Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind. New York:Basic Books.Gilbert, J. B. 1993. Clear Speech. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Hannaford, C. 1995. Smart Moves. Virginia: GreatOcean Publishers.Jackendoff, R. 1992. Languages of the Mind.Essays on Mental Representations. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press.Jackendoff, R. 1993. Patterns in the Mind. Exeter:Harvester Wheatsheaf.Mehler, J. and E. Dupoux. 1992. Nacer sabiendo.Introduccion al Desarrollo Cognitivo del Hombre.Madrid: Alianza.Murphey, T. 1990. 'The Song stuck in my headphenomenon: a melodic Din in the LAD?'System 18/1: 53-64.Odam, G. 1995. The Sounding Symbol. MusicEducation in Action. Cheltenham: Stanley Thorne.Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. London:Penguin.Singleton, D. 1989. Language Acquisition. TheAge Factor. Clevedon/Philadelphia: MultilingualMatters.Snow, C. 1977. 'The development of conversationbetween mothers and babies'. Journal of ChildLanguage 4: 1-22.Wallon, H. 1975. Los Origenes del cardcter en elNino. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visidn.The authorCarmen Fonseca Mora teaches English at theUniversity of Huelva in Spain. Her research is inthe area of the relationship between language andmusic in the EFL classroom. She has worked as aprimary teacher and as a teacher trainer in Spain.Her current interests include the acquisition ofprosody in LI and L2, self-access learning, and theteaching of oral skills.Email <fonseca@uhu.es>152 Carmen Fonseca Moraand melody singingIntroductionVariety oflearning stylesThis article considers the value of relating music and language in the EFLclassroom. From an ontological point of view, sounds are the roots of bothmusic and speech. Our 'melodic approach' is based on the evidence thatmusicality of speech has an effect not only on the pronunciation skills ofEFL students but also on their entire language acquisition process. Anumber of suggestions are made to provide the teacher with a range ofteaching devices.Hearing is one of the most basic and at the same time enrichingcapacities human beings possess. It is difficult for us to ignore a sound.Visual input can be easily avoided simply by closing our eyes, but we donot have a similar mechanism for 'closing our ears'. It is possible for usnot to 'listen to' something, but we will probably still 'hear' it. We canadapt ourselves to a rhythmic noise, such as the ticking of a clock in aroom, to the point where we are not conscious of it; however, we wouldnotice the silence if it stopped. Taking into consideration the pervasivepower of sound, we propose a melodic approach to language teaching inwhich emphasis is given to the melody of language. In no way are wedenying the importance of visual input, but our focus will be on givinggreater recognition to the beneficial use of modified auditory input in theEFL classroom.The theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983) pointed out thathuman beings, potentially and educationally speaking, have manydifferent intelligences and capacities that could be stimulated in theclassroom. One of the main implications for teaching of this theorywas that students should not only be taught to increase their verbal,spatial, and numerical intelligences, but also to nurture their musical,bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences.Clearly, we learn in different ways, and as learners unconsciouslyestablish our own preferred sensory system. While visual learnersprefer charts, diagrams, and written material, auditory learners likelistening activities, and kinaesthetic learners need to have movement,to be involved physically in much the same way as in drama or roleplaying.In this context the teacher should offer a varied gamut of activities toreach the different types of learners. All the intelligences of our learnersshould be addressed and developed in the classroom, including musicalintelligence, which is highly relevant for language teaching.146 ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000Music and Linguists define language as an instrument for communicative verballanguage interaction. However, the Spanish music therapist, Patxi del Campo(1997), asserts that in any oral interaction only 15% of the informationissued corresponds to verbal language, while 70% of the message isperformed through body language; the final 15% belongs to intonation,the musical character of language. This importance of body language canbe easily observed by watching a television debate with the volumeturned off. The body language clearly indicates the mood and attitude ofthe participants, and even their agreement or disagreement with whatthe other speakers are saying.Music and language share several features. On the one hand, both stemfrom the processing of sounds; on the other, both are used by theirauthors/speakers to convey a message, although language is much moreprecise than music, whose effect is mainly emotional. On another level,music and language have intrinsic features in common, such as pitch,volume, prominence, stress, tone, rhythm, and pauses. Another sharedfeature of language and music is that we learn both of them throughexposure. No language can be acquired without oral or written input (orvisual input, in the case of sign language), and in a similar fashion weacquire our notions of music from what we hear around us—which iswhy music from other cultures often sounds odd to us when it differssignificantly from the patterns of sounds and rhythms to which we havegrown accustomed.Jackendoff (1993) takes for granted that human beings are predisposedfor language, music, and vision. He defines language as the capacity ofcommunicating through words, music as the faculty of perceiving soundpatterns, and vision as the possibility of seeing the external world. Oncewe have a set of abstract patterns in our mind, we analyse any newstimulus by accommodating this additional information to our previousknowledge (Ausubel 1968). Our mental capacities hinge on theconstruction of unconscious patterns in response to visual, linguistic,or musical input, and on our ability to analyse it intuitively.Jackendoff (1992) also speculates that there is an interaction of facultiesto build up our understanding of our environment. Evidence of this canbe seen in an experiment carried out with adult native speakers ofSpanish (Fonseca 1997). The participants were given a picture and askedto tell a story related to it that included a beginning, a climax, and anending. They could choose whether to speak in Spanish or English.Before narrating the same story for a second time, they relaxed bylistening for three minutes to quiet instrumental music that includedwater sounds and birdsong. They were then asked to repeat the samestory they had told some moments ago. The background music was notswitched off while they were speaking, although the volume was turneddown. During the second narration they started verbalizing informationthat had not been coded visually, but rather proceeded from the musicalinput. They included things that were not in the original picture and,taking the position of an omniscient narrator, they talked about theForeign language acquisition and melody singing 147Intuitive melodicapproach in LIacquisition148characters' feelings. In this way, visual, auditory-musical, and emotionalinformation was encoded linguistically.The brain has different ways of processing outside information—differentspecialized devices, different types of intelligences, and therefore,different kinds of memories. In this connection it is very interesting tonote that psychological and linguistic studies reveal how the interactionbetween music and language acquisition is activated at a very early stage.Research has shown that a foetus perceives acoustic signals in the womb.Not only does it hear its mother's heartbeats, but it also receives sensoryinformation coming from outside the uterus. The neurophysiologist andeducator, Carla Hannaford (1995), describes the studies of Dr AlfredTomatis which show how five-month-old foetuses respond to phonemesof language, that is to say, to varying vibrations of sound such as thevowel sounds:Using fibre optic cameras, Dr. Alfred Tomatis discovered that thefoetus will move a specific muscle, in the arm or leg for example, whenit hears a specific phoneme. The particular muscle moved varies ineach foetus studied, but each time the same phoneme is sounded, thesame muscle will move. This early connection of a muscle response tosound suggests the significance of anchoring sensory input with actionfor learning to occur. This sensory-motor response to phonemesallows the foetus to begin the process of learning language in utero.By twenty-four weeks ... the foetus responds to music by blinking itseyes and moving as though dancing to a beat.(Hannaford 1995: 36)The psychologist P. Hepper concludes after studying the foetalbehaviour before and after birth:that newborns who had been exposed to the theme tune of a popularTV programme during pregnancy exhibited changes in heartrate,number of movements and behavioural state at birth. These effectscould be attributed to prenatal exposure alone and not to postnatalexposure or a genetic disposition, and were specific to the tune learned.(Cited by Odam 1995: 14)Taking into account these neurophysiological and psychological referenceswe could argue that the sound-learning process and its auditorymemory have started before birth, which would mean that soundperception and its analysis are among the earliest processes to develop.Mehler and Dupoux (1992) were interested in discovering the age atwhich a child would be able to recognize its mother tongue. Theyrecorded a perfect French/Russian bilingual speaker telling a story inboth languages. Two groups of French babies were exposed to thestories: a group of four-day-old newborns and a group of two-month-oldinfants. Both groups distinguished their language. Mehler and Dupouxconcluded that four-day-old newborns were capable of distinguishingthe typical melodic contour of their language, but not the words, becauseCarmen Fonseca Morawhen they were exposed to French-sounding sentences but withinvented words, they also recognized it as their language. Linguisticresearch has shown that each language has its own intonation and itsown tonal and rhythmic properties, and that even very young infants aresensitive to these.Discourse intonation, the ordering of pitched sounds made by a humanvoice, is the first thing we learn when we are acquiring a language. Lateron, it is through interaction that a child picks up not only the musicalityof each language, but also the necessary communication skills. In theearliest stage, it is usually the adult who behaves as a model,accommodating her/his speech style to the child's needs, but interactingwith older children (brothers or sisters) also seems to be profitable.The role of 'motherese' appears to be fundamental in the child's processof acquiring a language, not only because of the affective aspects that itoffers, as Wallon (1975) points out, but also because of the particularfeatures of this speech. From the very first moment, mothers tend toconsider their babies as perfectly prepared to understand them (Snow1977). Mother talk, also called parental or caretaker talk, is highlyrepetitive, and full of simple syntactic structures. Slowing down theirspeech production, mothers give an exaggerated intonation to theirutterances, pausing more notarily than in adult-to-adult speech betweenphrases and clauses.Feu and Pinero (1996) recorded the interaction between a Spanish boy,Guillermo, and his mother for four months. They studied the sonorouslinguisticcode established in this interaction and observed the use of atonal-linguistic unit they called 'celula sonora' (voiced cell). Theseauditory units contain syllables where the rhythm of stressed andunstressed vowels conforms to the musical pattern of a word. As anexample, they describe Guillermo's vocalization of the Spanish word'pajaro' (bird). His vocalic production, 'aaaaa-aa-oo' reproduced theternary rhythm and melody of the word.Crystal's (1986) research has also provided evidence that prosodicacquisition precedes speech production:In one child studied at Reading, aged 1; 2, the phrase all-gone, regularlysaid by the parent after each meal, was actually rehearsed by using theprosodic component only: the child hummed the intonation of thephrase first..., only then attempting the whole, producing an accurateintonation but only approximate segments ... The phrase could beeasily elicited after any meal, but it was not until a month had gone bythat the child's segmental output became as stable as his prosodic.(Cited by Singleton 1989: 42)There is also a special use of melodic contours at school. Children arestill involved in the LI acquisition process at the age of three. Feu andPinero (1997) studied teacher talk and also observed the use ofexaggerated intonation patterns by a Spanish teacher in the classroomwhen trying to elicit information from a three-year-old group. ThisForeign language acquisition and melody singing 149Melodic contoursin the EFLclassroomemphatic intonation occurred again when the teacher was explaininghow to do a new or more complicated task.Our direct observation of the discourse of EFL teachers (Fonseca 1997)also reflects this hyperbolic melodic contour, but it only seems to bepresent when s/he is introducing a new structure and having studentsrepeat or when s/he is acting as a linguistic model while correctingstudents' pronunciation.In the use of modified intonation, both mothers and language teachersare acting instinctively. They are unaware of the fact that they are'singing' at that moment. In both cases, they are expecting some type ofrepetition. In the same way that babies answer their mothers tonally,EFL students, when asked to repeat, give back the same melody, even ifthey are unable to pronounce the words correctly. In pairwork activityafterwards, where students have to use the structure just taught, they donot generally use that exaggerated pronunciation because they haveinterpreted it as a pedagogical tool to help them to pronounce better.Music and Singing is an easy way of memorizing something. Most of us canmemory probably remember having learnt the multiplication tables with aspecific tune. Melody seems to act as a path or a cue to evoke the preciseinformation we are trying to retrieve.Tim Murphey (1990) defines the 'song-stuck-in-my-head' phenomenon asa melodic Din, as an (in)voluntary musical and verbal rehearsal. Murpheyalso hypothesizes that the Din could be initiated by subvocal rehearsal.So, for example, we are able to rehear mentally the voice and words of aperson with whom we have had an argument. Similarly, while reading thenotes taken in a lecture, we will probably rehear the lecturer's voice, whileat the same time we can mentally visualize the place from which s/he wastalking and even her/his gestures or body movements.Music seems to leave a particularly deep trace in our memories; thiscould be due to the fact that it is related to affective and unconsciousfactors. It could also be related to the hypothesis that it is less energydemandingbecause musical perception starts before birth.Implicationsfor EFLWith the purpose of following a similar process to that of LI, the EFLteacher of beginners, at the early input stage, could consciously giveemphasis to the melody and prosodic features of the structure, pattern,or expression s/he is presenting. In order to do that, it is necessary totake the statement and to repeat it several times by giving emphasis tothe prominent stresses. By making the rhythmic articulation of theutterance more exaggerated, the intonation becomes more musical. Theselection of initial pitch has to be done by the teacher according to his/her singing abilities. The variation of pitch during the oral production ofthe utterance depends on the speech prosody pattern of each sentence.It is also possible to use a well-known tune. The opening melody ofBeethoven's Fifth Symphony is suitable for questions similar to that of150 Carmen Fonseca Mora'What do you do?' or 'Where are you from?', although it would not beappropriated when asking 'Where do you usually go to have a drink inSpain at five o'clock?' This melodic presentation of a structure has aslower tempo than speech, the syllables are lengthened, and pausesbetween different thought groups become more notable. Teachers adapttheir talk to their students' transitional competence while using thistechnique. The more rhythmic and intonated the utterances we teachare, the more holistic the learning will be. By focusing on rhythm andintonation we help our students to take in the new utterance as a gestalt.By engaging the concentration and motor control of children musically,their attention can be directed away from the tediousness of articulationexercises. Research has also shown that these carrier melodies stimulatethe right hemisphere. When we allow students to repeat, we are giving themmore time to process the new auditory information using their workingmemories. Later, of course, they will need to develop their mental grammarof the foreign language they are learning; more logical-analytical activitiesare essential to help the student to process meaning, usage, and form.For intermediate and advanced students the melodic approach is still auseful technique when teachers try to improve their students'pronunciation abilities (Gilbert 1993 provides us with excellentexamples). Concentrating on the musicality of speech is also a valuablestrategy for the EFL learner in listening comprehension activities.Training students to recognize the mood and attitude of the speakers bypaying attention to their intonation contours allows learners to retrieve acontextual element they are normally deprived of when they arelistening to a tape.In general, the use of music in the language classroom encouragesstudents to be quiet because it avoids other auditory distractions.Therefore, it is especially helpful to create the relaxing classroomatmosphere needed to develop written composition activities. Music hasthe ability to change the hearer's mood because it stimulates ourimagination. Songs are also useful. Students improve their pronunciationskills while singing, but at the same time the repetitive lyrics in songshave a positive effect on the students' language acquisition level. Songscan be easily remembered, and are therefore an effective way ofproviding students with lexical patterns that are stored in their mindsand that can be effortlessly retrieved during any oral interaction.Expressions such as, for example, 'It never rains in Southern California'or 'Didn't we almost have it all?', also help EFL students to have ahandy model in their minds to deduce grammatical information such as—in this case—the position of the adverb.One of the problems of EFL students is that once the English lesson isover they have not got many possibilities of receiving aural input in theforeign language. Yet students love doing activities related to music intheir freetime. When asked about their hobbies, listening to music,singing, dancing, or playing an instrument are very common answers. Itis possible to sing and even to remember the lyrics in a language oneForeign language acquisition and melody singing 151does not know at all. Probably everyone can remember a song learnt asa child, the meaning of which did not become clear till some years later.We can encourage students to take advantage of this handy andmotivating source of aural input in English.It can be argued that using a musical approach at the input stage willaccomplish several goals: first, verbal practice associated to musicalinformation seems to be more memorable; second, allowing students togive a choral melodic repetition of the new language just taught lowerstheir anxiety filter; and third, by strengthening their musical memory,the appropriate foreign sounds will be stored in the students' long-termmemory, and thus be accessible for subvocal rehearsal.From a more general point of view, music and musicality of speech inlanguage teaching provide a rich-sounding environment. This meansthat the melodic approach is at least a plausible educational alternativethat enhances the EFL learners' awareness of sounds, rhythms, pauses,and intonations. But its use can also be interpreted as an indicator ofhow much teachers cater for the needs and interests of their students.Received May 1999ReferencesAusubel, D. A. 1968. Educational Psychology: ACognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston.Del Campo, P. 1997. La musica como procesohumano. Salamanca: Amaru Ediciones.Feu Guijarro, M. J. and E. Pifiero Gil. 1996. Elmundo sonoro y la adquisicion del lenguaje'.Revista Musica, Arte y Proceso 2: 38-49.Fonseca Mora, C. 1997. 'Music, language andmind: foreign language acquisition throughsinging'. Paper presented at I Congreso Internationalde Estudios Ingleses, University ofAlmeria, Spain.Fonseca Mora, C. 1999. 'El papel de la musicalidaddel lenguaje en el proceso de adquisiciondel ingles como L2'. Unpublished PhD Thesis,University of Huelva.Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind. New York:Basic Books.Gilbert, J. B. 1993. Clear Speech. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Hannaford, C. 1995. Smart Moves. Virginia: GreatOcean Publishers.Jackendoff, R. 1992. Languages of the Mind.Essays on Mental Representations. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press.Jackendoff, R. 1993. Patterns in the Mind. Exeter:Harvester Wheatsheaf.Mehler, J. and E. Dupoux. 1992. Nacer sabiendo.Introduccion al Desarrollo Cognitivo del Hombre.Madrid: Alianza.Murphey, T. 1990. 'The Song stuck in my headphenomenon: a melodic Din in the LAD?'System 18/1: 53-64.Odam, G. 1995. The Sounding Symbol. MusicEducation in Action. Cheltenham: Stanley Thorne.Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. London:Penguin.Singleton, D. 1989. Language Acquisition. TheAge Factor. Clevedon/Philadelphia: MultilingualMatters.Snow, C. 1977. 'The development of conversationbetween mothers and babies'. Journal of ChildLanguage 4: 1-22.Wallon, H. 1975. Los Origenes del cardcter en elNino. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visidn.The authorCarmen Fonseca Mora teaches English at theUniversity of Huelva in Spain. Her research is inthe area of the relationship between language andmusic in the EFL classroom. She has worked as aprimary teacher and as a teacher trainer in Spain.Her current interests include the acquisition ofprosody in LI and L2, self-access learning, and theteaching of oral skills.Email <fonseca@uhu.es>152 Carmen Fonseca Mora
