ESL,+Learning+Language+through+Music+and+Eyegroove

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One of the more challenging parts about learning English as a second language is the use of every day words that don't mean anything, the issues with future tense, and little words that are powerful and have many rules but can seem inconsequential. http://mentalfloss.com/article/79843/5-things-make-english-difficult-foreigners-learn These roadblocks to the ESL student are further complicated by the slang we speak and our casual ways of conversation, all of which is most easily understood and modeled back by listening to popular music.

Music has long been the international language. Since the beginning of time, one can imagine that melody supplanted lyrics to convey emotion and intention and inspire a sense of community. According to The International Conference on the Future of Music Education, "Music lyrics and songs not only provide tools to strengthen and reinforce vocabulary, comprehension, listening, speaking and writing, but increase learning and grammatical variations with auditory skills and rhythmic patterns that stimulate brain activity and encourage imagination." Krashen, Stephen D. 1983. Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. It makes sense then, the music is a recognized and valued way for English as a Second Language Learners to acquire language skills.

There are many ways that educators can incorporate song lyrics into the classroom to inspire and enrich language acquisition skills. The following are more traditional methods to integrate music education into the ESL classroom, thus addressing the challenges of every day words, future tense, and small but powerful words.

1. Teachers can use lyrics to reinforce cognitive learning. A lyric as simple as "row, row, row your boat" can do wonders to cement both the image of a boat and the new knowledge of the word row in the learner's mind.

2. Music can be used to spark interest cross culturally and cross generationally. K Pop is one example of a musical genre that is embraced world wide and K Pop itself draws upon a multitude of cultures to be a melting pot of international pop music.

3. Song parodies can introduce humor. More sophisticated language skills require understanding humor for subtleties otherwise lost to the new English Language Learner. Imagine using the music and lyrics of Weird Al Yankovic to help ESL students understand irony, sarcasm and word play.

One of the cutting edge ways to use music as a learning instrument for the ESL learner, however, is the marriage of music and social media through the use of the hot new social media platform, eyegroove. Eyegroove is a particularly novel way to address the hardest parts of learning English as detailed above.

Eyegroove - http://www.eyegroove.com/ - is essentially a "musical selfie" app that helped users make short, high-quality music videos from their smartphones. Acquired by Facebook in the summer of 2016, Eyegroove is set to become 2017s hottest music app. Eyegroove could be difficult for a person with a disability to use because it requires being comfortable in a social setting, something teenagers with the stumbling block of not knowing a language can sometimes suffer from. The resource itself, however, being based in music, allows the user to feel instantly part of a community of people with the common love of music.  Imagine the power that could be harnessed by English as a Second Language Learners as they use their cellphones to create music videos of themselves singing lyrics to their favorite songs, complete with a complete audio track and visuals of their choosing. The power of this app to help ESL students better understand the intricacies of the English language as it relates to everyday conversation is immense, and the potential for this app to aid in more expedient acquisition of knowledge is vast.