Music Enrichment and International Chinese Teaching

Language and music are closely associated. Chinese songs incorporate language knowledge into lyrics organically, integrating learning into entertaining, the abstract into the tangible, thus providing students with more perceptual knowledge and tangible materials and arousing students' interests in learning. Poems with concrete images can facilitate students' association and memorization, enhance their understanding and consolidate the knowledge they have learned. There are many useful language learning materials in Chinese songs, which can be of help for Chinese teaching and learning when being utilized well.

For example, the Chinese song "Quantifiers for Little Animals" is a wonderful asset for learning quantity words and their collocations.

Quantifiers for Little Animals

One chicken, two ducks, and three little birds chatter loud;

Four cows, five horses, and six tortoises make no sound.

Seven fish, eight crawfish, and nine frogs keep croaking.

This song not only helps students to acquire the knowledge about figures, but also enables them to practice and memorize the fixed combinations of figures and quantifiers. Likewise, we can also apply songs in learning vocabulary of colors, fruits, animals, etc., pairing them up and memorizing them together.

In addition, to put "new wine into old bottles", i.e., to sing what is learned with background music, is a common practice of applying Chinese songs in teaching. For instance, many students find it dull and boring to learn how to introduce themselves and cannot manage to respond to questions such as "family members, names, and age". We can interweave these topics and sing them together with familiar melodies. When teaching the Chinese expressions for family members such as "father, mother, grandfather, and grandmother", I would select "The Family Song" as part of the classroom learning. The light-hearted Chinese song both enlivens the classroom atmosphere and contributes to students' retention and consolidation of their lexical knowledge.

By adopting Chinese songs in the teaching process, students can savor the beauty of Chinese phonetics by reciting the lyrics and singing the songs, while improving their sense of Chinese language in a subtle way. It is helpful for students to improve their phonetic expression and Chinese character recognition skills.

Chinese songs are "good helpers" for Chinese language teaching. Adopting Chinese songs as teaching resources demands that teachers carefully select songs that meet teaching needs and are suitable for students’ Chinese proficiency levels. For the criteria of selecting Chinese songs, I consider that they have to be melodious and appealing to students. Meanwhile, the complexity should be appropriate without being too challenging or too simple. In addition, the lyrics should be grammatical, and the differences between cultures should be taken into account to avoid cultural misunderstandings.

Learning to sing Chinese songs is indeed of significant help in learning Chinese, and it cannot be belittled for its role as an aid to Chinese teaching and learning to increase interests in learning Chinese. In future Chinese teaching, Chinese songs can be properly utilized to make Chinese classes more enjoyable.

About the author: Liu Haiyue, volunteer international Chinese language teacher in Ireland from 2019 to 2020.