Teachers' views on working with Music in the English Language Classroom

Abstract: The purpose of this degree project was to investigate the views of four elementary schoolteachers concerning the use of music in the English language classroom. Additionally wewanted to see how the teachers motivated their choices to use or not use music, and in order to answer our two research questions we chose to do semi-structured interviews with the fourselected informants. This method helped us to get an in depth perspective of the teachersthoughts and opinions. Krashen (1983) and Piaget (2008, 1988) provided us with theunderlying theoretical concepts for this study: ‘the affective filter hypothesis’ and ‘the theoryof cognitive development.’ Furthermore, we used selected previous research studies andtheoretical literature for the final analysis. Our findings show that the teachers have an overallpositive attitude towards using music and English together and that they all have seen positiveoutcomes for the students’ motivation and language learning when using it. Their motives forusing music were based on their own musical interests, their view of learning, the type ofclass they teach and their previous positive experiences. Our conclusion for this study is thatthe benefits that can come from using music in the English language classroom are far moreprominent than the challenges, and in the end it is up to the teacher to evaluate if this way ofworking will suit her learners. Therefore, our suggestion to English teachers is to at leastconsider the use of music in the English language classroom in order to experience thepossible benefits.