The Impact/s of Music on Language Learners' Performance

"In every part of the ancient world, music and musical instruments served magical or 'therapeutic' purposes rather than aesthetic ones" (Bancroft 4). Plato believed that "musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten... making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful" (Jowett 271). Meaningful communication is a multimodal construct, a large part of which is musical. Spanish music therapist Patxi Del Campo (1997) asserts, "In any oral interaction only 15% of the information corresponds to verbal language, while 70% of the message is performed through body language; the final 15% belongs to intonation, the musical character of language" (as cited in Mora, p. 147). Mora asserts that a child can imitate the rhythm and musical contours of the language long before he can say the words, and caretakers of young children will agree. She says that musical aspects of language, tone, pauses, stress, and timbre are sonorous units into which phonemes, the consonant and vowel sounds of language, are later placed (Mora 149). A significant amount of work is still being done regarding areas of the brain, but most teachers use the terms right brain and left-brain informally to describe a continuum between tasks perceived as feeling and artistic and those that seem thinking and scientific. For example, Regina Richards claims, "music, rhythm, and movement. create a link between the right brain"s processing of music and rhythm and the left brain"s processing of verbal information" (Richards 109). (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the 2nd World Conference on Psychology, Counselling and Guidance.