Teaching Through Music

INTRODUCTION
Music is an essential part of human existence. Different kinds of birds have different cries, songs and melodies to communicate about their world. Similarly music is used by human beings to express their thoughts and feelings about their inner world as well as their social world. It is hard to imagine a culture without music. Thus, music can be seen as the soul of human culture. Inthe context of education, music has become a popular subject in primary and secondary education and it is an established academic subject in tertiary education.
The definition has varied through history, in different regions, and within societies. Definitions vary as music, like art, is a subjectively perceived phenomenon. In the following examples we can see the great disunity of opinionsrelating to what music is. Wynton Marsalis said that “music is sound organized in time.”

Michael Linton perceives music as “the organization of sound and silence into forms
that carry culturally derived meanings, cultivated for aesthetic or utilitarian
purposes” (ibid.). Gottfried W. Leibnitz considered “music as nothing but
unconscious arithmetic” (ibid.). According to Luciano Berio music is“everything one listens to with the intention of listening to music.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a broader definition:

Music is an art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty
of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody,
and, harmony. Music most often implies sounds with distinct
pitches that are arranged intomelodies and organized into patterns of rhythm and metre.
Music is an art that, in one guise or another, permeates every human society. It is used for
such varied social purposes as ritual, worship, coordination of movement, communication, and entertainment.

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to escape music. It is used in films, advertisements, it is on radio and even in most shops, restaurants andother public places. Current technological inventions, such as the iPod, mobile phone and MP3 player enable people to enjoy their favourite music anywhere at any time. People listen to it while traveling and even while walking in the streets. In fact, a lot of children get into troubles for listening to music on their headphones during lessons. So why not use music to our advantage?Using songs to teach vocabulary, several conditions for teaching stated by Thornbury are met. In lyrics, words usually appear in context, the sound of new words is easily remembered along with the melody of the song and by listening to the song, students are exposed to the new words many times.

As mentioned earlier, the roots of music and speech seem to beclosely connected. Stansell believes That “music positively affects language accent, memory, and grammar as well as mood, enjoyment, and motivation” and that “pairing words and rhythm properly helps to hold songs together, and to improve the ability of the mind to recall it.

Murphey made the following list about what people usually do with songs. We:

*Listen.
* Sing, hum, whistle, tap, and snap fingers while we listen.
* Sing without listening to any recording.
* Talk about the music.
* Talk about the lyrics.
* Talk about the singer/group.
* Talk about video clips.
* Use songs and music to setor change an atmosphere or mood […]
* Use songs and music to create a social environment, form a feeling of community, dance, make friends and lovers.
* Read about the production, performance, effect, authors, producers, audiences of music and song.
* use music in dreams.
* Use music and song to make internal...