rhythm
“...and I can’t get it out of my head” (Electric Light Orchestra,1974).
Rhythm - so what?
Speech rhythm and it’s basic source, accenting, convey a great deal of information from speakers to listeners.
Accenting is important because it helps listeners break up the flow of speech into words, phrases and whole thoughts. Accenting also connects related thoughts (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). For example, the difference between emphasizing “It IS a pickup truck,” and “It is a PICKup truck” arises from differences in related thoughts; in the case of the first sentence, the speaker might be about to say, “But it’s not the pickup truck I was looking for.” The second sentence, on the other hand, might be followed by “But I was looking for a sedan.” Fundamentally, accenting signals which words we should pay special attention to.
In addition, all multisyllable words in English have accented and unaccented syllables. These help English speakers remember words and distinguish them from those which sound similar (Gilbert, 2008).
Nonstandard rhythm signals an accent to native speakers. Garbled rhythm often interferes with comprehensibility more than does the clarity of any given consonant or vowel sound (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). What's worse, students' accents can attract discrimination against them (Terrell, 2012).
The audio track below exemplifies the obstacles incorrect stressing adds to understanding speech. I first speak a sentence with garbled rhythm, then with standard rhythm.
- Rhythm - so what?
- Musical and linguistic rhythm
- Rhythm for teachers: Music selection; activities
Rhythm - so what?
Speech rhythm and it’s basic source, accenting, convey a great deal of information from speakers to listeners.
Accenting is important because it helps listeners break up the flow of speech into words, phrases and whole thoughts. Accenting also connects related thoughts (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). For example, the difference between emphasizing “It IS a pickup truck,” and “It is a PICKup truck” arises from differences in related thoughts; in the case of the first sentence, the speaker might be about to say, “But it’s not the pickup truck I was looking for.” The second sentence, on the other hand, might be followed by “But I was looking for a sedan.” Fundamentally, accenting signals which words we should pay special attention to.
In addition, all multisyllable words in English have accented and unaccented syllables. These help English speakers remember words and distinguish them from those which sound similar (Gilbert, 2008).
Nonstandard rhythm signals an accent to native speakers. Garbled rhythm often interferes with comprehensibility more than does the clarity of any given consonant or vowel sound (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). What's worse, students' accents can attract discrimination against them (Terrell, 2012).
The audio track below exemplifies the obstacles incorrect stressing adds to understanding speech. I first speak a sentence with garbled rhythm, then with standard rhythm.
In addition, deficits in the ability to synchronize to rhythm appear to be involved in dyslexia, a reading disorder. Overy (2003) says dyslexia involves problems with timing perception across a range of modes: “...language, music, perception, cognition and motor control.” As Overy notes, not just speech but “...reading is affected by temporal fluency.”
Once students have reached a low threshold of vowel and consonant mastery, their command of the rhythm and other whole-sentence features of English become the most important route to comprehensible speech and listening comprehension (Gilbert, 2008; Levis & Grant, 2003).
So rhythm is an indispensable part of communication in English.
But the forces driving rhythm vary from language to language (Patel, 2008; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010; Gilbert, 2008). Thus we shouldn't assume that English learners will learn which syllables to stress on their own. In fact many English learners find the stress patterns of both words and whole utterances challenging. Many of them don't realize that unstressed words are an important aspect of English (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006). So not only do problems mastering rhythm present significant barriers to understanding and being understood, rhythm in a new language doesn’t come automatically to many English learners.
Musical enhancement of English accenting helps students become aware of these sometimes obscure and difficult points implicitly, without their even knowing what's happening (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006). Teachers can also mickey-mouse musical rhythm to enhance the learning of vocabulary, letter-sounds, language rules, and language functions.
Musical and Linguistic Rhythm
In language, listeners hear rhythm as a periodic beat of accented and unaccented syllables. But in fact this periodicity in language is an illusion (Patel, 2008). The rhythm listeners perceive in language derives from intended meanings, language sounds and grammatical structures, not from a steady beat. This adds to the difficulty for English learners in noticing English rhythmic patterns.
Rhythm arises primarily through the stressing and destressing of syllables. The accenting of a syllable coincides with its vowel component. Accenting can involve variations in any of the four acoustic dimensions: loudness, duration, pitch and/or timbre (ibid).
Stress normally marks the most significant words in English sentences. These are content words such as nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. In English, speakers normally destress grammatical function words such as “the,” and “for,” which convey less semantic substance (Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin, 2010). This kind of stressing and destressing is an example of rhythm that derives from meaning, and from sentence structure.
An example of rhythm deriving from individual word sounds is the accenting of a multisyllable word like “maCHInery." This accenting is an established part of the pronunciation of that word.
Almost every spoken English utterance has a most prominently stressed syllable. In the case of contrasting elements, there can be two prominent syllables (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). The prominent syllable varies by the speaker’s intention and the conversational context. Usually, speakers put extra stress on a prominent syllable to emphasize and draw attention to that word for some reason. They may want to signal that it is a member of a contrasting pair, that it is new information, or that it marks an utterance boundary.
In music, by contrast, rhythm does not arise primarily from intended semantic meanings, language sounds or other extraneous forces. It’s true that as with language rhythm, the beat of music consists of the alternation of accented and unaccented individual notes. And as in language, musicians accent notes via variations in loudness, duration, timbre and pitch. But musicians can and usually do intentionally synchronize their accenting with a steady, periodic meter (Patel, 2008). This gives music rhythmic patterns that are easier to tap along with than everyday language.
Being overtly periodic and intentional, rhythm in music is a useful tool for naturally emphasizing the non-periodic and therefore harder to perceive rhythms of language (Margulis, 2013; Ulate, 2007). Music gives students practice with complete sentences, not just isolated words (Li & Brand, 2009). In addition, musical rhythm invites students to tap along, to sway their bodies, to connect to the rhythm in kinesthetic ways that make the patterns more memorable and meaningful. The remarkable similarities of musical and linguistic rhythm, together with the fact that musical rhythm is almost always more pronounced and engaging than speech rhythm, makes rhythmic underscoring of language one of the most powerful tools in Mickey's arsenal.
Cognitive overload
The mickey mousing potential of musical rhythm is all the greater because there seems to be overlap in the brain processing of musical and linguistic rhythm (Bhatara, Yeung & Nazzi, 2015; Patel, 2008). This also presents a danger, however; if the musical rhythm is too complex, or if there is conflict between language and music rhythm, learners may encounter cognitive overload.
One source of cognitive overload is syncopation. “Syncopation involves a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected which make part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is a general term for ‘a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm’…” (Syncopation, 2015).
Musical rhythm, however, like musical melody, is built of “skeletons” and elaboration (Patel, 2008). The elaboration can add complexity, but if the skeleton is simple and pronounced enough, the processing load should not overwhelm students.
So with careful underscoring, music helps both dyslexic and non dyslexic learners master the rhythms of English (Crane, 2006; Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006; Graham, 1996; Lems, 2005; Overy 2003; Speh & Ahramjian, 2009).
In Summary: Rhythm arises from accenting via variations in loudness, duration, pitch and timbre. In English, vowels are accented. English utterances usually have either one or two prominent syllables, which are usually stressed in order to emphasize those words. Musical rhythm is normally periodic, while linguistic rhythm arises from semantic, syntactic, and phonological forces. This makes musical rhythm ideal for underscoring, and thereby anchoring, linguistic rhythm. There appears to be overlap in the cognitive processing of linguistic and musical rhythm. So if rhythm is especially complex or irregular, music may interfere with the processing of language sounds.
Rhythm for Teachers
Music Selection
Teachers can select existing music, or create their own rhythmic chants accompanied by instrumentals. Selecting musical rhythm to underscore language rhythm primarily involves matching the most strongly accented notes of the music to the most strongly accented syllables of target language as it's normally spoken. If possible, the music's beat should exaggerate the linguistic rhythm. This may seem simple, but teachers need to select consciously, because many times the accented syllables in song lyrics don't match conversational English rhythm. If the song is an old favorite, a teacher may not even notice this.
Furthermore, even when targeting something other than rhythm, like vocabulary, the ideal is to kill as many words with one stone as possible. It can be confusing and frustrating, especially for beginners, to learn a complete passage or pattern to mastery, only to find out when they repeat it as they learned it that listeners are confused by their non standard pronunciation (Ulate, 2007).
Complexity
Another key to choosing music for English learners is finding music with the right level of complexity, depending on the level and needs of the students (Ulate, 2007). In addition to the possibility of cognitive overload, a danger with overly complex music is that students may pay attention to rhythmic patterns other than the rhythm being targeted. The more complex the music, the more different rhythmic patterns, at different levels of abstraction, a listener can “extract” (Patel, 2008).
One cause of a mismatch between language and music stress is when the “edges” of notes don't line up with the “edges” of stressed syllables (ibid). This aggravates syncopation, or irregular, unexpected beats.
Repetition, however, can overcome some of the problems of complexity. When listeners first encounter unfamiliar music, they normally tap faster to it than they do to familiar music. Listeners seem to be able to notice “larger scale” and more complex structures as the music becomes more familiar (ibid).
So as students advance, they can fine tune their accent with the help of more complexity in the music-language rhythm. Students master even the more complex rhythms with bit-by-bit practice.
In Summary: In selecting music to highlight linguistic rhythm, the music's most-accented beats should fall on the syllables that are accented in authentic speech. Preferably, the music should exaggerate target language rhythm. Teachers should avoid overly complex music, in which the edges of musical beats don't line up with linguistic accents, or which has a lot of syncopation (irregularity). Repetition alleviates some of the problems of complexity. Teachers should select music of increasing complexity as students progress.
Activities
In addition to selecting existing music which contains target language, teachers can design their own materials. For example, jazz chants are “... fragment[s] of authentic language presented with special attention to … [their] ... inherent natural rhythm” (Graham, 1996). A jazz chant is “not a distortion…[and]...works with any authentic language ... All you need is a strongly defined one-two-three-four at an appropriate tempo, and of course you don’t want the interference of a vocal.”
In the audio below, my students recite a jazz chant designed to practice the sound “ch,” taken from Graham, (ibid). So listeners can more clearly hear the words, we didn't accompany this chant with a melody. But normally we would have. Students practice these not necessarily always in order to hear the rhythm, but also to viscerally ingrain it in their speech.
Once students have reached a low threshold of vowel and consonant mastery, their command of the rhythm and other whole-sentence features of English become the most important route to comprehensible speech and listening comprehension (Gilbert, 2008; Levis & Grant, 2003).
So rhythm is an indispensable part of communication in English.
But the forces driving rhythm vary from language to language (Patel, 2008; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010; Gilbert, 2008). Thus we shouldn't assume that English learners will learn which syllables to stress on their own. In fact many English learners find the stress patterns of both words and whole utterances challenging. Many of them don't realize that unstressed words are an important aspect of English (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006). So not only do problems mastering rhythm present significant barriers to understanding and being understood, rhythm in a new language doesn’t come automatically to many English learners.
Musical enhancement of English accenting helps students become aware of these sometimes obscure and difficult points implicitly, without their even knowing what's happening (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006). Teachers can also mickey-mouse musical rhythm to enhance the learning of vocabulary, letter-sounds, language rules, and language functions.
Musical and Linguistic Rhythm
In language, listeners hear rhythm as a periodic beat of accented and unaccented syllables. But in fact this periodicity in language is an illusion (Patel, 2008). The rhythm listeners perceive in language derives from intended meanings, language sounds and grammatical structures, not from a steady beat. This adds to the difficulty for English learners in noticing English rhythmic patterns.
Rhythm arises primarily through the stressing and destressing of syllables. The accenting of a syllable coincides with its vowel component. Accenting can involve variations in any of the four acoustic dimensions: loudness, duration, pitch and/or timbre (ibid).
Stress normally marks the most significant words in English sentences. These are content words such as nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. In English, speakers normally destress grammatical function words such as “the,” and “for,” which convey less semantic substance (Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin, 2010). This kind of stressing and destressing is an example of rhythm that derives from meaning, and from sentence structure.
An example of rhythm deriving from individual word sounds is the accenting of a multisyllable word like “maCHInery." This accenting is an established part of the pronunciation of that word.
Almost every spoken English utterance has a most prominently stressed syllable. In the case of contrasting elements, there can be two prominent syllables (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). The prominent syllable varies by the speaker’s intention and the conversational context. Usually, speakers put extra stress on a prominent syllable to emphasize and draw attention to that word for some reason. They may want to signal that it is a member of a contrasting pair, that it is new information, or that it marks an utterance boundary.
In music, by contrast, rhythm does not arise primarily from intended semantic meanings, language sounds or other extraneous forces. It’s true that as with language rhythm, the beat of music consists of the alternation of accented and unaccented individual notes. And as in language, musicians accent notes via variations in loudness, duration, timbre and pitch. But musicians can and usually do intentionally synchronize their accenting with a steady, periodic meter (Patel, 2008). This gives music rhythmic patterns that are easier to tap along with than everyday language.
Being overtly periodic and intentional, rhythm in music is a useful tool for naturally emphasizing the non-periodic and therefore harder to perceive rhythms of language (Margulis, 2013; Ulate, 2007). Music gives students practice with complete sentences, not just isolated words (Li & Brand, 2009). In addition, musical rhythm invites students to tap along, to sway their bodies, to connect to the rhythm in kinesthetic ways that make the patterns more memorable and meaningful. The remarkable similarities of musical and linguistic rhythm, together with the fact that musical rhythm is almost always more pronounced and engaging than speech rhythm, makes rhythmic underscoring of language one of the most powerful tools in Mickey's arsenal.
Cognitive overload
The mickey mousing potential of musical rhythm is all the greater because there seems to be overlap in the brain processing of musical and linguistic rhythm (Bhatara, Yeung & Nazzi, 2015; Patel, 2008). This also presents a danger, however; if the musical rhythm is too complex, or if there is conflict between language and music rhythm, learners may encounter cognitive overload.
One source of cognitive overload is syncopation. “Syncopation involves a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected which make part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is a general term for ‘a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm’…” (Syncopation, 2015).
Musical rhythm, however, like musical melody, is built of “skeletons” and elaboration (Patel, 2008). The elaboration can add complexity, but if the skeleton is simple and pronounced enough, the processing load should not overwhelm students.
So with careful underscoring, music helps both dyslexic and non dyslexic learners master the rhythms of English (Crane, 2006; Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006; Graham, 1996; Lems, 2005; Overy 2003; Speh & Ahramjian, 2009).
In Summary: Rhythm arises from accenting via variations in loudness, duration, pitch and timbre. In English, vowels are accented. English utterances usually have either one or two prominent syllables, which are usually stressed in order to emphasize those words. Musical rhythm is normally periodic, while linguistic rhythm arises from semantic, syntactic, and phonological forces. This makes musical rhythm ideal for underscoring, and thereby anchoring, linguistic rhythm. There appears to be overlap in the cognitive processing of linguistic and musical rhythm. So if rhythm is especially complex or irregular, music may interfere with the processing of language sounds.
Rhythm for Teachers
Music Selection
Teachers can select existing music, or create their own rhythmic chants accompanied by instrumentals. Selecting musical rhythm to underscore language rhythm primarily involves matching the most strongly accented notes of the music to the most strongly accented syllables of target language as it's normally spoken. If possible, the music's beat should exaggerate the linguistic rhythm. This may seem simple, but teachers need to select consciously, because many times the accented syllables in song lyrics don't match conversational English rhythm. If the song is an old favorite, a teacher may not even notice this.
Furthermore, even when targeting something other than rhythm, like vocabulary, the ideal is to kill as many words with one stone as possible. It can be confusing and frustrating, especially for beginners, to learn a complete passage or pattern to mastery, only to find out when they repeat it as they learned it that listeners are confused by their non standard pronunciation (Ulate, 2007).
Complexity
Another key to choosing music for English learners is finding music with the right level of complexity, depending on the level and needs of the students (Ulate, 2007). In addition to the possibility of cognitive overload, a danger with overly complex music is that students may pay attention to rhythmic patterns other than the rhythm being targeted. The more complex the music, the more different rhythmic patterns, at different levels of abstraction, a listener can “extract” (Patel, 2008).
One cause of a mismatch between language and music stress is when the “edges” of notes don't line up with the “edges” of stressed syllables (ibid). This aggravates syncopation, or irregular, unexpected beats.
Repetition, however, can overcome some of the problems of complexity. When listeners first encounter unfamiliar music, they normally tap faster to it than they do to familiar music. Listeners seem to be able to notice “larger scale” and more complex structures as the music becomes more familiar (ibid).
So as students advance, they can fine tune their accent with the help of more complexity in the music-language rhythm. Students master even the more complex rhythms with bit-by-bit practice.
In Summary: In selecting music to highlight linguistic rhythm, the music's most-accented beats should fall on the syllables that are accented in authentic speech. Preferably, the music should exaggerate target language rhythm. Teachers should avoid overly complex music, in which the edges of musical beats don't line up with linguistic accents, or which has a lot of syncopation (irregularity). Repetition alleviates some of the problems of complexity. Teachers should select music of increasing complexity as students progress.
Activities
In addition to selecting existing music which contains target language, teachers can design their own materials. For example, jazz chants are “... fragment[s] of authentic language presented with special attention to … [their] ... inherent natural rhythm” (Graham, 1996). A jazz chant is “not a distortion…[and]...works with any authentic language ... All you need is a strongly defined one-two-three-four at an appropriate tempo, and of course you don’t want the interference of a vocal.”
In the audio below, my students recite a jazz chant designed to practice the sound “ch,” taken from Graham, (ibid). So listeners can more clearly hear the words, we didn't accompany this chant with a melody. But normally we would have. Students practice these not necessarily always in order to hear the rhythm, but also to viscerally ingrain it in their speech.
Jazz chants provide tools for teaching and practicing any everyday conversational function, such as greetings or exchanges in restaurants. Teachers can also design chants to introduce or reinforce vocabulary, grammatical structures, and “...particular sounds, stress and intonation patterns” (ibid). In this way teachers mickey-mouse, or underscore, specific language with music, providing material for individual, choral, or echo recitation.
Graham (ibid) recommends writing jazz chants in the form of questions and responses, or conversational back and forth. Although the chant can be spoken as a whole class, one half of the class can also ask, the other half can answer. As Graham notes, the most important factor from the language side of the language-music collaboration is that the sentences be authentic, something that students might actually use in real life.
To construct and use a jazz chant, do the following (adapted from Graham, ibid):
Chanting 202
This process can be generalized to writing lyrics for other instrumental music with a strong beat, even if it isn’t one-two-three-four. The difference is that before underscoring the target sentences with a rhythm and melody, teachers need to discover the underlying rhythm of that music. Then, as with jazz chants, the song writer taps out the music’s beat and “...say[s] the sentence with the underpinning of rhythm,” as in step six above (Graham, 1996). If a teacher does write chants to fit music beyond the one-two-three-four formula, this creates new opportunities to teach the advanced nuances of stressing different words in the same sentence.
For variety and to increase phonological awareness, the class repeats rhythmic lyrics with changing pitch, loudness, tempo and timbre. The singers change either the whole sentence, or only the stressed syllables. The teacher’s and the students’ imaginations are the only limit on different ways to vary the sounds of a sentence.
Varying pitch, timbre, duration and loudness teaches how to stress and destress by changing any of the four acoustic dimensions. Analyzing stress into its components, and learning to vary these components intentionally, gives students more conscious control over the stressing process. This is a major step on the way to comprehensible, native-sounding speech.
Movement
Coordinating body movements with rhythm is effective in emphasizing stress for learners (Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin, 2010). Body movement also occurs in "real world" conversations, when speakers emphasize important words with movements of their arms. To learn punctuation, for example, students emphasize with body movements points in written text where punctuation occurs as they read it. Including body movements mickey-mouses the modality of touch to both music and speech, providing underscoring that is both synchronized and more powerful than music alone.
Liperote (2006) teaches rhythm patterns to her music students by having them tap their foot for large beats, and either their hand on their thigh, or two fingers in their palm, for small beats. In language classes this method is ideal for teaching the stressing of content words and the destressing of function words.
Students should always know it's okay to tap, clap, hum or sway in time with linguistic rhythm on their own, too. Many of my students do this spontaneously during music activities, but I make sure to model a variety of body movements, so the students relax, and see that it’s okay to express themselves freely without fear of ridicule. If a student was shamed as a child into thinking s/he wasn't musical, s/he will be reluctant to get into the swing of musical expression. The best way to counteract these negative experiences is with positive, accepting advocacy for the students as musical beings. I find rhythm to be the aspect of music most likely to engage reluctant students. Even very shy students will usually unobtrusively tap a finger or toe. But even with something as engaging as rhythm, I still remind students of the educational effectiveness and purposes of musically "playing around." Unlike many children, adults need to know that they are not just frittering away their classroom time.
Reading rhythm
In addition to understanding the importance of rhythm and how to accomplish it in speech, students need to learn to incorporate authentic rhythm into texts they read. They can learn and practice this kind of rhythm by guessing where the accents will fall in a text, and highlighting the accented syllables on a copy of the lyrics. Then they confirm their guesses as they listen to the song (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006).
After verifying the correct answers as a class, students practice singing only the highlighted words, replacing the rest of the words with filler like “mmmmm...” (ibid). As an alternative, Levis & Grant (2003) recommend reading in chunks, pausing at each stop, to highlight rhythm and the clustering of thought groups.
To show how the same rhythm can apply to both words and sentences, Terrell (2012) employs an "echo game," in which one side of the class says a word with a certain stress pattern ("InapPROpriate"), after which the other half of the class calls out, from a list of possibilities, a sentence with the same rhythm ("I can HOPE for it," or "It's not Over yet").
Student songwriters
Students also enjoy writing their own sentences with the target rhythm. This piece-by-piece construction helps them build up to creating an entire poem or chant with the same rhythm as the music (Pearman & Friedman, 2009).
Many young adults enjoy rap music. Cuevas (2012) suggests writing lyrics to accompany a rap beat. Although a complex beat could facilitate creativity, because of the number of different patterns that listeners can perceive in it (Patel, 2008), beginning song writers are better served by a beat that is very repetitive and simple. The audio excerpt below illustrates a beat of intermediate complexity (Instrumental Hip Hop Beats Crew, 2011).
When transitioning to a song like this with some syncopation (irregularity), teachers might need to remind a songwriter that often, stressed syllables in songs don't coincide with the drum beats. One way to teach this is to slowly clap one-two-three-four along with the beat, so students see that there are different levels to the beat, some of which aren't explicitly accented. These generic beat tracks are widely available for download on the Internet.
Graham (ibid) recommends writing jazz chants in the form of questions and responses, or conversational back and forth. Although the chant can be spoken as a whole class, one half of the class can also ask, the other half can answer. As Graham notes, the most important factor from the language side of the language-music collaboration is that the sentences be authentic, something that students might actually use in real life.
To construct and use a jazz chant, do the following (adapted from Graham, ibid):
- Select a language feature students need to learn or practice, such as vocabulary.
- When targeting vocabulary, make a list of words from a single category, such as clothing. When targeting vowel/consonant sounds, make a list of words containing those sounds or contrasting sounds in the beginning, middle and end of the words.
- Imagine an authentic scenario in which students would practice this language. In many cases, any casual setting, such as a conversation between friends, will do. In other cases, the language feature will dictate a general direction; for example clothing might be discussed in a department store.
- Write a simple sentence using this language feature. The key here is to ask “What would I really say in this situation?” In a department store we might say “I’m looking for men’s pants.” On the other hand, if underscoring a grammatical structure like present progressive, a teacher would write different chants, all including the pattern “I’m ...-ing ....
- Write a question that would lead to the sentence above as an answer. For example, the sentence above might come after an employee asks, “May I help you?”
- “Tap out a steady one-two-three-four beat and say the sentence with the underpinning of rhythm” (ibid). The key here is not to distort the natural stress pattern of the sentence. The first beat of the music underscores the first stressed word. In this case the result would be “MAY - I - HELP - you - 3 - 4. I’m - LOOKing - for - MEN’S - PANTS - 4.”
- Add repetition and variations. For example, the next lines might be “MEN’S - PANTS - 3 - 4 ... MEN’S - PANTS - 3 - 4 … I’m - LOOKing - for - MEN’S - PANTS - 4 ... They’re - in - AISLE - FOUR - 3 - 4.”
- Limit the complete passage to something that can be learned in and practiced for just a few minutes without getting stale. Graham (ibid) says, “I often open my class with a chant, spending two or three minutes in choral repetition, snapping my fingers or tapping them on my desk to establish a solid beat. I move in and out of chanting throughout the lesson, returning to it when I want to change the mood, raise the energy level, or practice a particular sound or structure. I rarely spend more than five minutes at a time on a given chant.”
Chanting 202
This process can be generalized to writing lyrics for other instrumental music with a strong beat, even if it isn’t one-two-three-four. The difference is that before underscoring the target sentences with a rhythm and melody, teachers need to discover the underlying rhythm of that music. Then, as with jazz chants, the song writer taps out the music’s beat and “...say[s] the sentence with the underpinning of rhythm,” as in step six above (Graham, 1996). If a teacher does write chants to fit music beyond the one-two-three-four formula, this creates new opportunities to teach the advanced nuances of stressing different words in the same sentence.
For variety and to increase phonological awareness, the class repeats rhythmic lyrics with changing pitch, loudness, tempo and timbre. The singers change either the whole sentence, or only the stressed syllables. The teacher’s and the students’ imaginations are the only limit on different ways to vary the sounds of a sentence.
Varying pitch, timbre, duration and loudness teaches how to stress and destress by changing any of the four acoustic dimensions. Analyzing stress into its components, and learning to vary these components intentionally, gives students more conscious control over the stressing process. This is a major step on the way to comprehensible, native-sounding speech.
Movement
Coordinating body movements with rhythm is effective in emphasizing stress for learners (Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin, 2010). Body movement also occurs in "real world" conversations, when speakers emphasize important words with movements of their arms. To learn punctuation, for example, students emphasize with body movements points in written text where punctuation occurs as they read it. Including body movements mickey-mouses the modality of touch to both music and speech, providing underscoring that is both synchronized and more powerful than music alone.
Liperote (2006) teaches rhythm patterns to her music students by having them tap their foot for large beats, and either their hand on their thigh, or two fingers in their palm, for small beats. In language classes this method is ideal for teaching the stressing of content words and the destressing of function words.
Students should always know it's okay to tap, clap, hum or sway in time with linguistic rhythm on their own, too. Many of my students do this spontaneously during music activities, but I make sure to model a variety of body movements, so the students relax, and see that it’s okay to express themselves freely without fear of ridicule. If a student was shamed as a child into thinking s/he wasn't musical, s/he will be reluctant to get into the swing of musical expression. The best way to counteract these negative experiences is with positive, accepting advocacy for the students as musical beings. I find rhythm to be the aspect of music most likely to engage reluctant students. Even very shy students will usually unobtrusively tap a finger or toe. But even with something as engaging as rhythm, I still remind students of the educational effectiveness and purposes of musically "playing around." Unlike many children, adults need to know that they are not just frittering away their classroom time.
Reading rhythm
In addition to understanding the importance of rhythm and how to accomplish it in speech, students need to learn to incorporate authentic rhythm into texts they read. They can learn and practice this kind of rhythm by guessing where the accents will fall in a text, and highlighting the accented syllables on a copy of the lyrics. Then they confirm their guesses as they listen to the song (Ebong & Sabbadini, 2006).
After verifying the correct answers as a class, students practice singing only the highlighted words, replacing the rest of the words with filler like “mmmmm...” (ibid). As an alternative, Levis & Grant (2003) recommend reading in chunks, pausing at each stop, to highlight rhythm and the clustering of thought groups.
To show how the same rhythm can apply to both words and sentences, Terrell (2012) employs an "echo game," in which one side of the class says a word with a certain stress pattern ("InapPROpriate"), after which the other half of the class calls out, from a list of possibilities, a sentence with the same rhythm ("I can HOPE for it," or "It's not Over yet").
Student songwriters
Students also enjoy writing their own sentences with the target rhythm. This piece-by-piece construction helps them build up to creating an entire poem or chant with the same rhythm as the music (Pearman & Friedman, 2009).
Many young adults enjoy rap music. Cuevas (2012) suggests writing lyrics to accompany a rap beat. Although a complex beat could facilitate creativity, because of the number of different patterns that listeners can perceive in it (Patel, 2008), beginning song writers are better served by a beat that is very repetitive and simple. The audio excerpt below illustrates a beat of intermediate complexity (Instrumental Hip Hop Beats Crew, 2011).
When transitioning to a song like this with some syncopation (irregularity), teachers might need to remind a songwriter that often, stressed syllables in songs don't coincide with the drum beats. One way to teach this is to slowly clap one-two-three-four along with the beat, so students see that there are different levels to the beat, some of which aren't explicitly accented. These generic beat tracks are widely available for download on the Internet.
Writing their own raps and chants, if milked, helps students improve several language skills at once; students get practice in recalling vocabulary, timing and rhyming words in grammatical constructions, adding intonation, and writing them down. They also get pronunciation and reading practice when they sing the songs.
To add a challenge and game quality to activities, songwriters modify songs so that their rhythmic beat gets faster and faster. (Speh & Ahramjian, 2009). By singing along with songs faster and faster, students' speech becomes more and more fluent. The rhythm and other acoustic properties of recorded songs can be customized at will by using the free program Audacity.
Chanting rules
A final consideration is that music anchors memory (Wilcox, cited in Terrell, 2012). Thus rhythmic chants, even if unaccompanied by melodies, help students remember rules (Lems, 2005). The classic example is "I before e, except after c."
I have written a couple of these chants. I find that these really only work when I incorporate rhymes into them; for example, when teaching how to form the past tense of regular verbs, I formulated one of the rules as "Ends in e, just add d." If one word in the chant is especially important, then ideally it should receive the greatest stress.
Many students enjoy it when a teacher challenges them to create their own chant/rhyme mnemonics for rules they are learning. The fact that the students create the rhymes themselves makes them more meaningful, and more memorable.
In Summary: Teachers can design their own chants of varying complexity to teach English rhythm. Chants, especially if they rhyme, also help students remember rules. Students learn the mechanics of stressing, destressing, and rhythm by varying the pitch, loudness, duration and timbre of syllables, and by accompanying stress with body movements. They learn and practice rhythmic patterns by highlighting stressed syllables and by composing their own poems, raps and chants. Speaking or singing with an accelerating rhythm increases fluency.
To add a challenge and game quality to activities, songwriters modify songs so that their rhythmic beat gets faster and faster. (Speh & Ahramjian, 2009). By singing along with songs faster and faster, students' speech becomes more and more fluent. The rhythm and other acoustic properties of recorded songs can be customized at will by using the free program Audacity.
Chanting rules
A final consideration is that music anchors memory (Wilcox, cited in Terrell, 2012). Thus rhythmic chants, even if unaccompanied by melodies, help students remember rules (Lems, 2005). The classic example is "I before e, except after c."
I have written a couple of these chants. I find that these really only work when I incorporate rhymes into them; for example, when teaching how to form the past tense of regular verbs, I formulated one of the rules as "Ends in e, just add d." If one word in the chant is especially important, then ideally it should receive the greatest stress.
Many students enjoy it when a teacher challenges them to create their own chant/rhyme mnemonics for rules they are learning. The fact that the students create the rhymes themselves makes them more meaningful, and more memorable.
In Summary: Teachers can design their own chants of varying complexity to teach English rhythm. Chants, especially if they rhyme, also help students remember rules. Students learn the mechanics of stressing, destressing, and rhythm by varying the pitch, loudness, duration and timbre of syllables, and by accompanying stress with body movements. They learn and practice rhythmic patterns by highlighting stressed syllables and by composing their own poems, raps and chants. Speaking or singing with an accelerating rhythm increases fluency.