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Recently, I was sitting in a Spanish cafe feeling home-sick. When a familiar song almost instantly snapped me out of that morning's melancholy. Back home, I probably wouldn't have paid much attention to the low-tempo sounds typical of hipster coffee shops. But the distinct English lyrics gave me pause and a moment to reminisce. That is the power of language, a time machine that allows you to reflect or imagine. For those that believe the world is at your fingertips, learning additional languages is paramount. For language professors, the onus is on them to distill the world into something comprehensive. Productive teaching skills aid in this. These skills are in large part, complemented by our creative endeavors. As educators, the ability to curate lessons in a way that is both functional and engaging is an obvious win. A worthy endeavor is incorporating music in lessons as a means to ramp up TEFL teaching skills. By heightening the language learning experience, music can bridge cognitive gaps and cultural misnomers. We learn to crawl before we dance just as we learn to speak before we sing. Lyricism, rap, and spoken word are manifestations of the limitlessness of verbal creativity. These are variants of linguistics and can be appropriated by educators with music communication games. There are visible links to music and language proficiency. Several studies have determined that speech and music sounds are integrated into the brain similarly (François, Chobert, Besson, & Schön, 2012; Schön et al., 2010). A recent study by The Institute for Brain Science at the University of Washington found that baby brains tabulate rhythm patterns in music thereby improving their detection and prediction of speech patterns in language (Zhao & Kuhl, 2016). "This means that early, engaging musical experiences can have a more global effect on cognitive skills," the leading researcher Christina Zhao said (Zhao & Kuhl, 2016). In essence, music can enable better language learning in babies. Rhythm isn't just in the hips it's in the brain. Suddenly, the "Baby Shark" baby jam obsession makes so much sense. Unlike the whimsy of humming to "Hush Little Baby," writing is more formal. It's developed in mind and only made possible by structure. One's native language powers that structure. Depending on where you come up, those structures are jeopardized. A consequence of colonization and a means of production, mother tongues are being hacked off, replaced by the accessibility and capital of speaking English. Of the 7,000 currently, existing languages nearly half are expected to be extinct by the end of the century (Boroditsky, 2017). Sure that's good for English teachers but what about the rest of the world? In a recent TED talk, Lera Boroditsky seeks to examine this and how language variety molds a more meaningful society. She extends upon the Saphir Worf hypothesis that a person's native language shapes how we perceive the world (Boroditsky, 2017). "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 (Boroditsky, 2017)." Borodisky outlines just how impactful ones vernacular is to a person's subconscious and their sense of place. She argues that salvaging the multitudes of communication will inevitably lead to greater mental diversity within the world. Music can curb this effect by unsealing the lips of vanishing languages. We've seen this manifest in mashups of English and Spanish or Spanglish as a musical language. Shakira Shakira and other artists have been crossing over into Spanglish jams to appeal to a broader audience for quite a while now. Social media, like Youtube and Facebook, has compounded accessibility to such music. This metamorphosis soundtracks foreign languages into the ears of the globe. At least for a moment, music is capable of shrinking the world into a collective understanding. And isn't this the goal of the classroom? I had a touch of this magic back when I was teaching undergraduates creative writing. I tasked them with writing a song or rap lyrics to encourage critical thinking. Ultimately, this assignment quelled writing anxiety and gave them the confidence to be creative. The implementation of music is just one option for promoting language learning. The takeaway here is framing lessons with creativity in mind. For better or worse language is, pardon the pun, the Rosetta Stone of humanity. It codifies our interpersonal relationships, even our sanity. As gatekeepers, our task is to translate tradition literally. Speaking and writing inform culture and language. Music can transcend both culture and language. In doing so, it incentivizes both. It is the perfect echo chamber in bonding humanity both in and outside the classroom. Boroditsky, L. (2017). How Language Shapes the Way Think. TEDWomen2017. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think/footnotes?language=en François, C., Chobert, J., Besson, M. and Schön, D. (2012). Music Training for the Development of Speech Segmentation. Cerebral Cortex, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhs180. Retrieved from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811910001916?via=ihub Zhao, Christina T., Kuhl, Patricia (2016). Effects of Musical Intervention in Infancy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 2016. DOI:10.1073/pnas.1603984113. Retrieved from: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/19/5212
