Cracking English

Can music and melody aid our memory? Is it easier to learn L2 vocabulary from a song? I hope so, because I’ve got a lot of songs on this website.

But let’s try an experiment in class.

Below there are mp3 audios of a word list. The list has twenty words. The words have no relation to each other; they represent several different parts of speech.

In two of the audios the word list is spoken (one by a male, and one by a female).

In the third audio, the words are sung to piano accompaniment.

Directions
Split your class into two groups. One half of the class will listen to a spoken audio (doesn’t matter if you choose the male or female). The other group is going to listen to the musical rendition of the same words.

You will need two rooms, or one room and the hallway, and two music players. Members from one group should not hear what the other group hears.

No one is allowed to write anything down. No pens or pencils at all. They may play the audio over and over again for 3 minutes. (All the audios are about 30 seconds long). The goal is for each individual students to memorize, during these three minutes, as many of the words on the list as possible.

After the listening is done students should individually, without looking at each other’s work (remind them this is an experiment!), write down as many of the words as possible.

When that is done, and you have discussed all the words on the list, ask each student to report honestly how many he remembered. Calculate averages for each group: the spoken word group, and the song group.

Which group rememebered the most words?

This experiment is not good science and not good research, and it doesn’t really prove anything. But I still think it’s a good activity. Students will be curious about the results, and this might provoke their curiosity about language and vocabulary in general, and they may even follow up with some of their own investigations.

If nothing else, there’s bound to be some discussion afterwards. Here are some questions that might help stimulate that discussion:

What do you think of the results? (after tallying them up)
Do you think that music helps you learn English?
Do you think it could be harder to learn a list of words that was sung to music?
Did the singing of the words interfere with your initial understanding?
Were the words clear enough for you to understand?
Would it be easier if you saw the words as you heard them?
Did any of the words seem to go together—by sound?
Were you confused by the compound words (mousetrap, suitcase)?

The next day or two days later try again: ask students to write as many of the 20 words as possible.

Options
There are many ways to expand on this experiment. You might involve four groups instead of two. Groups 3 and 4 would have a list of the words, so they could read them while they were trying to memorize them. Take the lists away when the time is up, of course.