Researcher Dr Jessica Mordsley explains, on the examples of Welsh and Spanish, why rhyme, repetition, and rhythm are so effective in helping us learn a language.
Rhymes are useful for children and adults
Many cultures around the world use nursery rhymes to soothe, entertain, and teach their young children. Simple, repetitive songs are often the first steps in learning language – their rhyming and rhythmic structure helps babies, and children and adults too, to remember and retain words.
The musicality of language learning
Musicians acquire new language patterns more easily than non-musicians - and there are parallels between the skills that musicians and linguists need – for example, the ability to identify and create specific sounds, to segment sound patterns (i.e., divide these up into smaller units of sound), and the need to develop sophisticated aural memory and perception.
How can we use this relationship to teach languages?
Pupils retain vocabulary in additional languages more easily when these are taught through song, compared to normal speech. Many language teachers already incorporate songs to help the learning process. But teachers can take this a step further by teaching languages using the inherent sound qualities of the languages themselves.
Every spoken language has its own ‘prosody’ - the characteristic patterns of stress, intonation, and rhythm. Unlike English, in both Welsh and Spanish the stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable of a word (although this varies, according to the position of the word in the phrase).
One way to teach languages through music
Some primary schools in Wales have been teaching English, Welsh, and Spanish at the same time, in sessions led by linguists and professional musicians, as part of a project called ‘Cerdd Iaith / Listening to Language’. The programme teaches listening skills, and trains the children's ears to hear the characteristic rhythms and melodies of the three languages.
The first exercises introduce single words in English, Spanish, and Welsh. Each syllable of every word is given a musical tone and rhythm, and this creates a small unit of music. The words are introduced to pupils as musical units, along with images of the object they represent, with all three languages presented together.
For example, using a slideshow, pupils are shown a picture of a dragon along with the word in each of the three languages, and above each of the words is the number of syllables:
2 1 2
dragón draig dragon
A learner clicks to play the word, as spoken by a native speaker. Clicking on the number plays a short piece of music that imitates the sound of the spoken word. Initially, all three languages are played every time the word is used.
Teachers can then encourage the pupils to say the words by using different combinations of cues, like images or sounds. They can play the musical phrase, and ask the children to say the matching word. Or they can play the word in one language and ask the children for another language, using the syllable count as a clue.
Then, pupils are introduced to more complex units – whole phrases rather than single words – of the type that would not normally be encountered in the early stages of language-learning.
Spanish - Tengo hambre
Welsh - Mae eisiau bwyd arnaf i
English - I'm hungry
These three very different and complex grammatical structures are challenging to translate word-for-word, but make more sense as entire musical phrases.
The below verses are in Spanish, Welsh and English and are all incorporated into a song, an original composition by Gareth Glyn in the form of a tango in C minor, that the students and teachers learned together. Rhyme is used to create unity of sound and sense, and repetition to assist memory.
Mae eisiau bwyd arnaf i
Mae syched arnaf i
Mae ofn arnaf i
Mae peswch arnaf i
I have a cough
Tengo ganas de bailar
El tango, tango, tango, tango
Tengo ganas de bailar
Dwi wedi blino
Beth yw’r ots?
Dwi eisiau dawnsio’r
Tango, tango, tango, tango
Dwi eisiau dawnsio
I feel like dancing
The tango, tango, tango, tango
Yes, I feel like dancing
Watch Tango’r Tengo: