A study that compared teaching Spanish-speaking students English vocabulary using a song or a spoken poem has found definite and long-term advantages to the song form.
The study involved a large group of Spanish-speaking Ecuadorian students, of whom some were randomly assigned to learn a 29-word English text as an oral poem, and some others learned it as a song.
None of the students had had any formal instruction in English; and all had some limited music training.
The students were given 4 training sessions and 3 testing sessions over two weeks, with a final test six months later.
Students in the song group out-performed those in the spoken group on every measure: their ability to recall the passage verbatim, pronounce the words, and translate target terms from English to Spanish.
While pronunciation of vowels was notably better, though there was no difference in consonants.
Long-term recall is of course the main question of interest: six months after this experiment, with no English instruction since, those from the song group could recall without prompting an average of 8.83 words out of 10 target words, compared with 0.29 words for those from the spoken group.
The song itself, its melody and rhythmic structure, was remembered very well. The students in the song group also enjoyed the learning sessions much more, which is what we recommend as a way to supplement your language learning.
