Judy DeFilippo supervises student teachers getting their MATESL degree at Simmons College and is an ESL (English as a Second Language) specialist. She has authored and co-authored numerous textbooks for ESL students including So to Speak 1 and 2, Grammar Plus, and Great Dictations. All her books are available on Amazon.
Over the years, Judy and I have been in contact for various events. Her knowledge of ESL fascinates me, and her interest and desire to integrate her practices with music is wonderful. Today, I bring to you some correspondence I have had with Judy on some of the ways music and literacy is connected to English language learners.
Developing listening skills with ESL students
There are connections between listening to language and listening to music. If you think about how we first learn our native language, it is through the sing-song voice of our mother. We learn the sounds of our language before we write them down, we hear the intonations of letters and syllables before we learn to read them. Dictations are a very important part to learning and practicing a language, just as listening to music is key to music literacy.
I’d like to share a comment one of my Japanese students recently made on her evaluation of my class: “(I) think dictation is most helpful. To do dictation, I could notice where I couldn’t listen to.” The Asian women in this class had excellent grammar and writing skills but I discovered that they were quite weak in listening. I had them do different kinds of dictations: Pair, cloze, prediction, dictogloss (listening to a sentence only once, writing down what they remember, and reconstructing the sentence with a partner).
In ESL the research tells us that listening is the first skill that is acquired, followed by speaking, reading and writing. We know how listening to language regularly helps build fluency and those of us in the field have integrated music into our listening/speaking courses on a regular basis. Thirty years ago a jazz pianist, Carolyn Graham, introduced her book JAZZ CHANTS at a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) convention and became an instant hit. This is especially significant for our Asian students who need practice in intonation and stress.
My co-author, Cathy Sadow, begins every ESL listening class with a jazz chant! She also uses popular music. She features one song aweek and plays it at the beginning of each class, M-F. In one class she’ll focus on vocabulary, another class will discuss the meaning of the song, etc. We choose music that students can sing to, like James Taylor, Eric Clapton, Ann Murray, and songs with clear lyrics/messages that are appropriate for class discussion. I began with songs for my core class that focused on specific grammar points, like the past tense. I used Ann Murray’s “You Needed Me”. I’d give them the lyrics in cloze form and they had to fill in the missing words they heard. In another lesson I might give a brief bio in cloze dictation form of the singer, Stevie Wonder or Elvis Presley before introducing the song.
One year I got a surprise Christmas card from a Chinese woman who had been in my class several years before. On the card she had simply written, “I’ll never forget when you played ‘Lady in Red.’ You never know the long term effects that music can have on your students!!
