IMPROVING EFL LISTENING SKILLS IN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF MUSICAL METHODOLOGY
Keywords:
Music, Listening skills, Adult learning, Foreign language educationAbstract
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the research fields of how music may affect language learning; several techniques that involve different kinds of musical support have been used to develop student’s skills in the use of language due to music influences the motivation in the classroom, diminishes anxiety (that distinct foreign language learners face) and it is an entertaining way to learn. The present study was to test the influence of a teaching short program with musical support that aimed at improving listening skills on foreign language on 24-35-year-old Spanish speakers who are learning English as a Foreign language with academic purposes and they both are rated at an A1 level in the foreign language (English).
It was mainly focused on adults due to the minor interest that exists in teaching foreign languages to this demographic group, it was taken into consideration the motivational factor for learning this new tongue (reaching a master degree) and their tastes in music for them to have enjoyable encounter
Different musical sources such as karaoke and mainly an app called lyrics training were used to get a close relationship with the participants enhancing a better recognition of the phonemic register of the English language. Christiner and Reiterer (2013) consider singing as a ‘good indicator of the ability to remember new and unintelligible utterances’ and that the ability to sing improves auditory memory span (Fonseca et al., 2015). There were six sessions in which the participants moved from passive to active hearing and learnt to recognize and differentiate sounds from L1 to L2 in the words that were used in the songs; these recognitions were given by the pronunciation of the sounds while singing and after hearing how the native speaker (the singer) makes those utterances.
The songs chosen didn’t count with advanced grammatical structures due to the level of the participants. The interest of this research project was to compare the results within the level of proficiency of the participants before and after the intervention with the proposed activities and what was expected was to improve the recognition of foreign sounds through the musical practice. Results point to the beneficial influence of a musical teaching approach for phonological training due to the improvement of the participants in this field after the practices, both participants didn’t react in the same way and better results were shown on the participant that has more exposure to the English language through the music he often listens to.
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