Struggling to learn a foreign language? Try singing it. Research published in the scientific journal Psychology of Music has found that songs can help people learn to better pronounce and remember foreign vocabulary.
Songs are already used by educators to support the encoding and retrieval of information, Canadian researchers Arla J. Good, Frank A. Russo, and Jennifer Sullivan noted in their study.
“Whether it is a song about the body parts, or the alphabet set to music, singing is often used in the classroom as a means to facilitate learning. For example, educators in English-speaking cultures commonly promote memorization of the alphabet by setting the letters to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,'” the researchers explained.
Many educators already believe that songs can help people learn foreign languages as well as learn information in their native language. But Good and her colleagues wanted to scientifically test this idea.
The researchers had 38 Spanish-speaking children from an elementary school in Ecuador learn a passage in English over a 2-week period. One class was randomly assigned to learn the text as a song, while the other class learned the text as a poem.
They found that students who learned the passage through song were better at pronouncing, recalling and translating the English text than the children who learned the text as a spoken poem.
But what is it about songs makes things easier to learn?
Good and her colleagues noted that previous research indicated the rhythmic and melodic organization of a text made it easier to recall.
“The children in the sung condition were better able to employ the structure of the rhythm by maintaining the correct number of syllables of each line,” they explained. “When asked to recall the lyrics, the children in the sung condition would often sing through the melody and tended to use nonsense words to fill in unremembered gaps.”
The integration of lyrics and melody is another way in which songs might help the encoding and retrieval of information, Good and her colleagues said.
“The context of melody may have assisted the children in the translation of the target terms in much the same way as learning foreign vocabulary can be supported by the added context of an image. The lyrics may become integrated with the melody, which helps to create a context and memory representation for each foreign word.”
However, the researchers found that after a delay of 6 months without any formal instruction, the children’s ability had deteriorated to the point that kids in the sung condition and the spoken condition were equally good at translating the text.
“A lack of practice of the translations over the 6 months may have limited the maintenance and deepening of the semantic knowledge for both conditions,” Good and her colleagues wrote in their study. “The ability to translate foreign vocabulary is a crucial element when learning a foreign language and may require frequent practice and elaboration to support deeper levels of encoding.”