Giedrė Balčytytė-Kurtinienė

ABSTRACT

Language and music commonalities and the effect of the integration of the two realias have been the focus of research by many scholars in a vast majority of fields, ranging from neurology to cognitive sciences and education. There is extensive emerging evidence that music instruction in an EFL classroom positively affects the acquisition of English pronunciation and in particular the aspects of English connected speech: rhythm, elision, assimilation, linking and other. The current study aims at examining the mutual counterparts of language and music and pointing the areas of prosodic structural overlapping as well as testing the effect of musical activities to the development of EFL university students’ connected speech skills. An experiment was conducted with a cohort of 28 EFL students who were exposed to selected sentence patterns through musical expertise. The subjects of the test group demonstrated a better skill in stressing, strong /weak syllable production, vowel reduction and linking. Overall, the results revealed a positive language and music integration transfer, moreover, it was observed, that the correspondents with enhanced musical aptitude benefited most, which in turn supports several didactic theories as well as the previous research on learner types and the better pronunciation performance of auditory learners.

Keywords

Music; pronunciation; integration; rhythm; connected speech; linking

References

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