The Impact of Musical Component on Vocabulary Acquisition

The Impact of Musical Component on Vocabulary Acquisition

SHADURI, George

Key words: suggestopaedia, vocabulary, musical session, jazz ABSTRACT The teaching method of suggestopaedia, which originated in the 1970s owing to the efforts of Bulgarian psychotherapist Georgi Lozanov, has already been applied in the framework of studies dealing with ELT. In practice the method consists of several stages, the central of which represents intonation reading against appropriate musical background. Unconscious or not fully conscious psychical activity linked to the concept of “concert pseudo-passivity” is critical at that stage. There have been a number of studies conducted in Georgia with the use of this method. This paper is a modest attempt to contribute to this relatively new and exciting field of pedagogy. The author conceived to conduct the experiment, while using the 20 century music during the phase of concert pseudo-passivity. It should be mentioned that suggestopaedia generally uses classical music to create the concert pseudo-passivity. The author, however, experimented with two genres of the 20th century: blues and jazz. Thus, the experiment was broken down into two parts. In the first part, the author aimed at investigating whether applying blues poetry as means for intonation reading, combined with the blues music as an audio-mirror of the read verse, influences the degree of acquisition of the vocabulary at the advanced level. The (first part of) experiment conducted showed positive result which allows of further investigation in the area. In the second part of the experiment, the author conducted twelve academic sessions, of which eight (8) went on using traditional way of teaching vocabulary, and four (4) were done with the elements of suggestopaedia, with the use of jazz music. The experiment has proven that with the use of suggestopaedia the academic outcome of the students increased by 20%, which can definitely be qualified as methodological success, which can be used as an auxiliary tool in the course of teaching.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1770