Professor Richard Stokes
Professor of Lieder at the UK’s Royal Academy of Music, talked to Ellie Buchdahl – British Council about teaching the wonder of language through music
Ellie B.
Musician or teacher – which are you, Prof. Stokes?
R. Stokes
I am certainly not a musician. When I started my first teaching job, I dug out Die Schoene Muellerin (because that had been my first love), set the words to learn for homework, then played the tape and got my students to sing along. It was wonderful. I had the whole class making a caterwauling sound.
Ellie B.
But can caterwauling get you through your GCSEs?
R. Stokes
The more I taught through poetry and music, the more convinced I became that it worked. Intelligent young people want intelligent material and if you have these great phrases resonating inside you, you learn a lot about tenses, prepositions and cases. It’s linguistically memorable in a way that perhaps a newspaper article isn’t, and given that you like it, it’s just a gift.
Ellie B.
Did you find singing improved your students’ pronunciation too?
R. Stokes
If you’re learning a new language, you’re going to find unfamiliar sounds that your mouth won’t have made before – the ‘a’ sound in ‘cat’ in English, for example, is very unfamiliar to German speakers.
It’s easy to get away with that when you speak, but when you sing, you have to rest on those vowels. Singing forces you to open your mouth and chew on the words. You have to get hold of consonants and pre-voice some sounds. You have to project, and that forces you to take risks and be expressive. All that carries through when you speak the language.
A song or a poem can be a window into one country or language, like a borehole into another world, and that in itself gives so much depth to the language you’re learning.
– Richard Stokes
Ellie B.
Is there anything else language learners can learn from a song?
R. Stokes
History, philosophy, linguistics – something political like Brecht and Weill’s Three Penny Opera. A song or a poem can be a window into one country or language, like a borehole into another world, and that in itself gives so much depth to the language you’re learning.
From: https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/how-sing-your-way-language-success
How to sing your way to language success By Richard Stokes, Ellie Buchdahl
18 November 2014
Sample track from LETTERHEROES (part 2)
