Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES
Over the years I’ve repeatedly encountered the suggestion that music should be taught in much the same way as we have tended to assume language is acquired.
Advocates of this theory point out that:
- Firstly as babies we hear words;
- Soon we start to mimic them;
- In time, we learn to speak fluently;
- Later (perhaps several years later), we are taught to read;
- And then to write.
I’m not a linguistics expert, but I suspect that this linear sequence is somewhat over-simplistic. In any case, it is adapted by some to propose this music education equivalent:
Hear → Sing → Play → Read → Write
It has long seemed to me that finding any direct or useful equivalent between musical learning and theories of language acquisition is more difficult than some suggest. And like many experienced teachers, I have observed that those taught according to this notion don’t always develop into good music readers.
In this short article I will flirt with the complexities here by asking three important questions:
- How do music and language seem to behave differently?
- How does informal learning prepare us for formal tuition?
- Does learning always follow the same one-way sequence?
As with the initial proposition, direct answers to such questions are elusive; perhaps it is sufficient to simply acknowledge their existence. But let’s take a brief trip to this hinterland together…
Continue reading Hear, Sing, Play, Read, Write?