We were given a presentation by a very young woman who worked on a project called the Vermont Harmony Project, which went into migrant communities and taught them (and performed) songs. Her presentation was wanting in direction. Her “any questions” left me blank. But the more I thought about what they’d done, the more it gave me inspiration for teaching.

Songs can be a road into language and way to build community. It involves: enjoyment, words, noticing, empowerment, ownership, audience, affective filter, repetition, restructuring, self-confidence, cultural exchange, camaraderie.

In the project, they asked participants to write lyrics phonetically as they heard them. And rather than keeping that private, they became part of the project, which is brilliant. There’s gigantic in allowing people to write a language phonetically. When I was in Turkish, I wanted to write words as I heard them so made up my own phonetic alphabet, but we moved so quickly to the real Turkish alphabet that I fell behind in note-taking every time, and never understood the sound of the language or the sounds of its alphabet, since I didn’t have long enough to focus on either. There’s controversy about whether allowing phonetic vs. proper writing is good pedagogy, but I think it’s a great tool. And to take it a step further, sharing with one another what each person heard seems a good way to lower the affective filter (no one is really getting it, and it can lend to lighthearted fun as the real words emerge). And nothing, at that stage, is “wrong”: whatever each person has written is true for them. No pressure.

So I support the idea of letting people transcribe in whatever way makes sense to them, and later use that as an entrée into English spelling.

I found it intriguing how differently the Spanish-speakers heard and represented on paper the English words they heard in the songs. An interesting an enlightening pronunciation exercise could begin there, with people writing on the “community blackboard” their own representation of what they heard. Fascinating examples from the VT project:

• Guaryusei: Whaddyasay
• Juelluib: Where do you live
• Evri bari guants tulem: Everybody wants to learn
• Dolo dasn’t protect as: The law doesn’t protect us
• Ay guanacon: I want to call
• Huat homber: What number

And here is the whole “Silvie” song (which this young girl attributed to Sweet Honey and the Rock, but of course it goes back to slave times)

Vrinmi liro uuader silvi
Vrinmi liro uuader naw
Vrinmi a liro a cilvia
Evrilero wunchxi y nova

Looking at these is further a great way to identify common pronunciation challenges between the native and target languages. It’s also to see what they’re hearing consistently (“vrinmi”). They wrote this after having the song sung to them.

The examples above were taken from Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border by Tomas Mario Kalmar (2001). I believe it was his dissertation.

I started thinking about what songs I might use. The first that came to my mind was one of Dad’s and my favorite: Wildwood Flower. I’d tend to stick with American traditional songs because they’re pure and folksy. To most listeners, Wildwood Flower makes no sense in some places:

“I will twine with my mingles of raven-black hair.
With the roses so red and the lilies so fair.
And the myrtle so bright with its emerald dew.
And the pale and the leader, and eyes look so blue….”

Would it be bad to use a song like that? Maybe. But maybe not. Take meaning away and you’re free to play with sound. Look at all the varying allophones of “i” in the first line, for example. You could look at conjunctions and prepositional phrases and adjective positioning. There are ample restructuring possibilities.

And then there’s the culture you could discuss. Appalachian agricultural poverty and other themes that may have meaning to the students.

So I think I’d really like to use songs in my classrooms. I could try to sing something. They could sing with me. We could look at the song as pure sound. They could experiment with interpreting its sound without even worrying about meaning. We could see how they’re hearing it: a valuable tool. We could move into writing and meaning and all that. And we could keep singing.

One last thing I remember about the girl’s presentation that struck me later: On their first session with the migrant workers, there’d been confusion about the schedule so they spent only ten minutes together: long enough only for the Vermonters to say “hi” and sing their song, pretty much. I think that accident turned out to be a happy one. On that first meeting there was no pressure of expectation and performance. Just a sound — music that humans universally love — and the establishing of a thread that could be picked up once it had anchored itself in their minds.

When we broke back into our class groups, Elizabeth did her own exercise with music.

She put a picture of Bob Marley up on the screen. She asked who knew of him: what did he do, what were his beliefs? Was he violent or peaceful? People volunteered bits of info so that everyone had a basic sense of who he was and where he was from. Then she laid out three pictures on the ground: line drawings of a man waking up, three birds on the threshhold, and a worried man. She asked questions about them to bring out some target vocabulary: worry, three little birds, rising sun, smile… This whole section comprised the “pre-listening” portion of the exercise.

Listening: Explain that she was going to play the song and we’d put the three pictures in order. Listen for phrases and meaning (in some groups of ESL learners, students would take notes). She played a section of song and had the group discuss. For ESL learners, they would have assembled the three drawings in order. Then there was an amusing section in which each student held one word or phrase from the song. When she played the song again, each of us had to hold up our word when we heard it. It was quite amusing. She did a more advanced exercise with sentence strips: phrases the comprised the song. We all got on the floor and tried to put them in order as we heard them. It took two times through the song for native speakers, so this is not for the novice.

Post-Listening: She’d written all the lyrics on a big sheet of newsprint, had Brandon hold it, and we all sang the song and danced a little. That, I think, was so students could hear sentence stress. Oh, and she also divided us into three groups and had us make up our own little dance so that, when the song was playing and she pointed to us, we had to perform it. It was quite entertaining and light, and good for community-building. I felt exhilarated after the music: full of energy and cheer. Another round of applause for music in the classroom.

She said that in an ESL classroom, another post-listening activity might be to ask the students what they do when they feel worried.

At the very end she pointed out that not only is this a good listening activity, but it is a rich source of grammar instruction too: restructuring. With the lyrics held in front of the class, we noticed that just in this one part of this one song there were examples of: negations, poetic v. spoken English, word order, imperative verbs, contractions and a dozen more opportunities. Actually, I don’t know what one would do with them… keep coming back to the song in subsequent classes? I hope to find out later.