Canzone e didattica della lingua inglese: una proposta interdisciplinare

Abstract

Although popular songs have been used for many years in the teaching of English, they are still regarded as little more than a 'seductive' tool and mainly as a grammatical aid. This essay overturns this approach, starting from a reflection on the relationship between music and language, and then shifting the focus to the phonetic and phonological aspects of songs. At the core of this reflection is the voice, and the use it can be put to in language and music (and therefore in singing). First of all, we point out that in many ways the learning of a language, in which the oral dimension is increasingly regarded as a priority, implies a process similar to that required for learning to sing, i.e. making discrete sounds both when listening and when performing. Using the Kodály method and working on phonetics, it is therefore possible to envision a method that proceeds in parallel with the teaching of English and music. The privileged work instrument will be the Anglo-American folk song, on account of its specific qualities, for its being fully immersed in local contexts and perfectly intelligible, because it is not submerged by invasive arrangements unlike most popular songs. Thus understood, the song becomes both a vehicle for approaching the 'deep' culture of the Anglo-Saxon world, where the popular song is increasingly the expression of a global culture, and a play with sounds: this turns out to be ideal for the practice of fluency, which is crucial to access advanced language levels. The goal is to develop the ability to decode and reproduce sounds, both linguistic and musical, in order to create an attitude that can then be transferred from the phonetics of the English language, and from tonal and tempered music, in which the Kodály method is embedded, to other languages and to music based on other intonation systems.