"Final Exam" Part 2

Discuss some ways that you can use your art to enhance students acquiring English literacy skills.

I think that music and language arts are the perfect match. Creating musical compositions can help students to internalize reading and comprehension skills. The composition of musical phrases and larger compositions is very similar to the composition of sentences and stories. I think children have an innate ability to recognize and process the similarities and apply them across subject lines. If students can apply rhyming skills from song to their understanding of the English language (as the lesson plan I linked to on my literacy page suggested), they can do the same with punctuation (musical phrasing), syntax (chord progressions and other structural elements), and other advanced concepts.
One activity that might be useful is improvising music to accompany passages of text. It would be extremely helpful to come up with a percussion pattern or melodic line that reflects the patterns, intonation, and cadences of poetry and prose. Famous passages from Shakespeare would be a great place to start. Students could begin by tapping out the rhythm of a line and build up from there. A teacher could organize a Shakespeare “chorus” and have some students tapping the rhythm, other students coming up with and singing a melody to the line, and others improvising. This way, the music and the literature will inform each other—each will become internalized and connected. Students will be encouraged to bring that much thought and musicality to their reading, and they will bring the communication and storytelling skills from written and spoken word to their music.
Music could also be a great tool for students who are learning English as a second language. Folk songs are a wonderful resource for themes that are common and relatable across cultures. Students might find it helpful to translate music from their first language into English so that the familiar themes will give the English words a richer meaning for them. An activity that could bring parents into the classroom is a student-parent performance day, in which the parent performs a cultural song, then the student performs it in English and teaches the other students. Learning through teaching could be a very valuable experience.