Study On The Relationship Between Music And Human Language And Its Revelation To Language Teaching

Music is the language of soul. For years now, the place of music for therapeuticand language developmental functions have been identified by medical experts,natural and sociological science professionals, scholars, and teachers at home andabroad. And also, over the last twenty years, researchers have made significantadvances in theories of language acquisition. Many of them noticed that, as parallelsystems with similar way of developing, there is compelling conjoining betweenlanguage and music.The author has referred to a number of scholarly materials and research results athome and abroad which include the origin and evolution of language and music, thehistorical records about language and music, relations between language and music,the processing model of language in human brain, the perceptive area of music inhuman brain, and the subsidiary of music to language learning process. Through thereview of previous research results, I found many phenomena, as English songs mayhelp a lot in English learning process in terms of cultivating sentiment, creating apleasant atmosphere, arousing students’ interest, providing authentic environment thusbringing greater cross-cultural awareness. Can I go a step further, to explore the recentresearches of neuroscience and cognitive science in the areas of music and language,to find the links between music and language that might provide insights for languageacquisition, especially in the second language acquisition and foreign languageteaching？Based on the relevant theories and the latest research data and results, this thesisfirst emphasizes the historical and evolutionary evidences and the contemporaryresearch status of the relationship between music and language; and then in chapterthree, it covers the neurological theory and empirical researches on music and humanmind; chapter four introduces both the relations between music, language, and thebrain and the role of music in language class; chapter five established a model of applications of music in future English teaching and learning. In the end, the thesisboth summarizes the scholarly exploration on the musical application for teaching andlearning languages and give suggestions to language teachers and language learners tohelp them make better curricula.