Because music is already a part of language, specifically the emotional and expressive part, music can be a key to unlocking language abilities such as accent, tone, grammar, and vocabulary. On the first page, I explain how I use music to teach grammar. I then talk about how to reinforce memory, improve comprehension, and make learning more enjoyable and effective.
"Rhythm and harmony penetrate deeply into the mind, and have a most powerful effect on it. If education is good, they bring balance and fairness." Plato. We can use rhythm, melody, harmony, movement, and visual imagery to make learning a second language fun. Along the way, we can find structure and patterns that help to develop the intuition required by spoken language.
Using music should be an active learning process. Singing, dancing, clapping, or chanting can enrich a hands-on environment, as part of a suite of learning strategies that work in concert with each other to make enjoyable, and therefore memorable cultural events. Familiar music merged with unfamiliar language structures can help to improve outcomes for students, parents, and teachers alike.