Using music in world language performance assessment



Using music in world language performance assessment

Dr. Jennifer Eddy

Queens College, City University of New York

Dr. Jennifer Eddy is Vice President of the National Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Language and Assistant Professor of World Language Education at Queens College. She is author of Sonidos, Sabores, y Palabras (ThomsonHeinle), a book that uses song lyrics in performance based assessment design.

Prelude

Music can be integrated into all levels of the world language curriculum. Culturally authentic songs are works of art not only to be heard for appreciation of a particular musical genre or for a listening, cloze activity. These songs should be aligned to a theme, line of inquiry, or idea that appears in the curriculum. This article looks at song lyrics as culturally authentic material for developing standards-based performance assessment tasks with our communicative modes.

Overture

Before we examine why music is so powerful for assessment in the world language classroom, let’s ask some questions first on your personal connection to music: What for you is the most meaningful part of a song? The most engaging aspect of a song? The most memorable? Consider a song you heard in another language. What did you do to try to understand the song? What did you do with the lyrics, both oral and written? How do you think you showed you understood the song? Could you explain it to someone else? Did you write about it? Compare it to another song or poem you know? Could you critique the song? Can you imagine a different ending? Identify themes or issues in the piece? Did you ever imagine yourself as the person in that song? Relate the message in the song to your own experience or be able to empathize with it? (Eddy, 2006a)

Language learning through the arts extends the learners’ understanding of themselves and their world while guiding them in creating meaning and developing their range of self expression. Of all the performing and visual arts, music awakens inquiry and active learning in ways that rote memorization and fact recall fall short. Music defines and transmits culture, dissolving barriers of religion, cultures, race, geography, and class. Every society responds to and creates music. Music takes our students on a journey of different sounds, instruments, and rhythms, telling a story of cultural history along the way about the people, events, and perspectives that shaped the most universal of cultural products. (Eddy, 2006b)

Indeed through the lyrics as well, students learn about other cultures, their influence on varied musical genre, and the practices, and perspectives of the cultures that influenced the artists and their work. There are connections to other disciplines such as art, history, environment, social issues, and literature. Learners can make comparisons with issues revealed in the lyrics and the messages in music from their own cultures, understanding various cultural communities through a much wider and inclusive lens.

Exposition

Using music in the classroom should be much more than a medium for a word recognition or fill-in task. Music can uncover big ideas (Mc Tighe & Wiggins, 2001/2005) in the curriculum while engaging us in change, not only in our understanding of our world but also in creating new works of art from that inspiration. Music inspires us to transfer our understanding into new genre, poetry, prose, visual art, new songs, dance, or theatre. How many original art forms spin off others? Do the themes of these pieces cycle and recycle over time? Such are the themes in our lives as reflected in the art form of music. In our experiences across the lifespan, recursive themes reprise and resurface, allowing us to spiral concepts, skills, and lessons learned and apply them to different contexts and situations with flexibility and adjustment, requiring transfer (Eddy, 2007; Mc Tighe & Wiggins, 2001/2005). This flexibility and high adaptability will be called upon time and again when faced with new situations.

To truly understand language and culture, it is not via rules and rehearsal, even rules sung to a tune. It is through exploration, participation, and reflection, forming new connections via continuous interaction with the culture along the lifespan of the learner. Music and lyrics provide the culturally authentic material necessary for intentional engagement of the learner. It is the learner’s response to this music that demonstrates evidence of understanding in performance based assessment. Music and song lyrics are culturally authentic materials when the songs are written by and for the culture (Galloway, 1998) and like any authentic text, are essential in designing performance based assessment (Adair-Hauck, 2006; Glisan, Adair-Hauck, Koda, Sandrock, & Swender, 2003). This author distinguishes culturally authentic song from pedagogically prepared chants, lyrics, or parody and does not use those for developing performance assessments.

Variations on a theme

When working with teachers on developing performance assessments with music, we look at the work of Aesthetic Education (Greene, 2001) to create tasks with lyric, song, and sound within a standards- based curriculum design (Fuchs-Holzer & Noppe-Brandon, 2005). Aesthetic Education guides the teacher to develop a line of inquiry when examining a big idea or key theme from the song or from your unit. I ask the questions: How does this culture transmit these ideas through the song? If the song had a moral, what would it be? (Eddy, 2006a). What do you want your student to go away with, as the message or story of this song?

Aesthetic Education also speaks to our Communication standard and the three modes of communication: Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational (ACTFL, 1996/1999). . “Each mode involves a particular link between language and the underlying culture that is developed gradually over time” (National Standards for Foreign Language Education Project, 1996, p. 32) The Communicative modes provide the purpose and function for the authentic tasks and echo the kinds of challenges students face in using the language outside the classroom. They also provide the opportunity for solutions and a venue to solve them through multiple points of view.

All works of art, including music, enhance the capacity of the learner to construct meaning (Vygotsky, 1962). This process allows the learner to explore ideas through multiple points of view (Holzer, 2005), expect unknowns and be flexible to them. The student then transfers this understanding via multimodal (Gardner, 1983/1993) performance tasks that support the musical piece and deepen inquiry into cultural practices and perspectives. Flexibility and transfer are the hallmarks of our performance assessment system.

Performance Assessment is addressed within each of the three modes:

Interpretive: communication between student and the song, the culturally authentic content; to discover appropriate cultural and/or linguistic meaning within the music by listening, reading, categorizing, and making connections between existing knowledge and new information. Translation is not an interpretive mode task. Interpretive mode tasks are comprehension grounded tasks, and are generally provided before the others so that students can gather information, call up background knowledge, organize new vocabulary, and make meaning of the lyrics. These tasks give students the tools they need to move to Interpersonal and Presentational mode tasks, which in turn shift students to production, negotiation of meaning, and creative use of the language, new vocabulary, and transfer of knowledge and skills to performance.

Interpersonal: two-way interactive communication between pairs or groups of students; to engage in active negotiation of meaning by listening and speaking in unrehearsed, spontaneous, and unscripted exchanges, about the music lyrics, themes, or issues in the song. Activities where students know in advance how they will respond as well as oral Q&A with grammar forms are not examples of Interpersonal communication.

Presentational: communication involving a single student or groups of students; to create and present a piece orally or written that has been refined, rehearsed, or planned with some anticipation, such as reports, essays dialogues, surveys, poems, songs, journals, or plays. At each mode, there is important feedback for each task, so that learners can see what they need to do to move them closer to performance goals.

Performance assessment with song lyrics yields student products that draw upon their understanding of the lyrics and transfer interdisciplinary concepts, knowledge, and skills. These tasks ask students to solve a problem, reflect, or create a product (Gardner, 1983/1993) from their understanding of the lyrics and the cultural messages they represent. Before using music and song lyrics for designing performance assessment, consider what you want the learner to be able to do as a result of working with this song. Choose music selections that have interdisciplinary themes and reflect cultural practices and perspectives, not just because they exploit a particular grammar point or are limited to a skills-level, grammatical exercise.

What do you want the students to “take away” from the song and remember about the message or the culture(s) that created the song? What would that understanding look like? What evidence do you want to see from your students that they understand the messages and ideas conveyed in the song? Develop a few pre-listening activities, tasks where the students can predict or brainstorm from the theme. These are designed to activate prior knowledge on the theme of the song. There is some controversy on whether pre-listening tasks should be in the target of native language. Numerous studies have shown that when the native language is used to for comprehension and recall, comprehension skill is not confused with the ability to produce in the target language. Shrum and Glisan (1994/2005) suggest that it may be more advantageous to have pre-reading or pre-listening activities in the native language, particularly if students need new information prior to listening to the song or reading its lyrics.

Next, consider the kind of tasks that enable transfer. Design tasks with the three communicative modes in mind to determine how you want your students to demonstrate their understanding of the song and themes. In designing performance assessment, your song selection will be the culturally authentic material that guides the learner and provides the motivation for all subsequent tasks. The learner will react to the song, make inferences, list, organize, create semantic maps or graphic organizers, listen for the main idea or key details in the Interpretive mode (Shrum & Glisan, 1994/2005). Using vocabulary within lyric, students use strategies such as circumlocution, finding cognates, and developing metaphor to work at the meaning of the lyrics and the message behind the music. Open-ended questions require students not to recall facts in isolation but to use critical thinking, planning, synthesis, and reflection to prepare a product, presentation, or performance.

If you want them to be able to discuss a lyric, talk about the song, or solve a problem based on a theme in the song, move next to Interpersonal tasks that draw on student work derived from their Interpretive mode task. These all provide a reason for conversing in a non-scripted, spontaneous way. The tasks yield a solution or product that allows for practice of active negotiation of meaning, an essential skill in interpreting meaning. With these tasks, your students will ask to repeat, clarify, confirm and self correct.

Lastly, give students the opportunity also to refine and polish a Presentational mode task and to self evaluate their work too. Have students develop and use semantic maps they created during the Interpretive mode tasks when writing or preparing scripts, short poems, stories, song verses, and talking points for debates. Research shows that these maps help learners recall and organize vocabulary for writing and speaking later on (Morin & Goebel, 2001). The best presentational mode tasks lead to a product or performance (Gardner, 1983/1993) housed within a situation or opportunity that actually occurs in real life or has a purpose for a given audience. For example, students write a mini screenplay using that song as the title track, or they complete a survey that deals with particular issues within the song. Maybe they create a Venn diagram on similarities and differences expressed in the song that exist in two cultures. Perhaps it is a brochure on cultural practices of a place represented in the song, or a short diamante poem that retells the issue in the song, blending new and previously learned vocabulary (Eddy, 2006a/b; 2007). These tasks not only demonstrate evidence that the learner can create with the language, receive feedback, and refine their product, but also that the learner has an opportunity to reflect on what remains outstanding for further inquiry, research, and practice.

Reprise

When using music and song lyrics as culturally authentic materials for designing performance assessment, keep these questions in mind as you plan:

o What do you want your students to be able to do as a result of working with this song?

o What do you want them to “take away” from the song and remember?

o How will they demonstrate this? What evidence do you want to see from your students that your students understand the messages and ideas conveyed in the song?

o What kinds of tasks offer the opportunity for transfer, from skills to application in a new situation not previously taught?

o What skills and knowledge do your students need? What does meaningful practice of those skills look like?

o What do planning and instruction need to look like for all this to happen? (Eddy, 2006b)

The following list is just a sample of performance tasks using music. When students hear music as a work of art connected to a theme or message in your unit, the vocabulary and skills will have purpose and cohere to recurring ideas in your curriculum. These are entirely adaptable and could be used with any song and many other culturally authentic materials.

o Ask questions about artist’s intent.

o Use Semantic mapping

o Draw visuals for song

o Watch music video for song; what would you do differently?

o Solving problems, dilemmas, situations

o Create a summary of song for presentation, role play, powerpoint

o Role play character in song

o Design Graphic organizers (venn diagrams, word webs, etc)

o End the song differently

o Organize with KWHL charts

o Show empathy; If I were him, her, them…

o Change the genre

o Role-play-dialogue

o Create a 3rd person journal entry

o Skim for the gist

o Scan for details

o List opposites

o Predict meaning

o Foreshadowing new language

o Activate background knowledge

o Anticipate new vocabulary

o Increase vocabulary through circumlocution

o Create metaphor

o Generate word families or derivatives

o Replace underlined words with similar or different words to create a new verse

o Write a spoof, parody or skit based on song.

o Propose solutions with a classmate on issues presented in song.

o Change the genre and write a poem based on the song.

o Gather photographs that match situation, action or themes and give them captions.

o Be a song or art critic.

o Construct a short survey based on the issues in the song.

o Draw emotions relevant to the song or unit theme, then dance what you drew

o Design a museum exhibit.

o Change the ending to a song.

o Write new verse.

o Write a movie or theatrical plot based on a song, painting, or photograph.

o Compose poetry

o Create own music video for the song

o Select an object to match the meaning of a word, phrase or entire song

o Conduct a survey or poll

o Create a list of main ideas and match them to phrases in the song

o Assume role of the singer

o Walk in the shoes of a person the singer refers to in the song

o Write a letter to the person in the song

o Compare song track with another song you know with a similar theme

o Create an advertisement

o Persuade the person singing

o Draw a cartoon strip on the topic of the song

o Solve the problem in a song

o Construct a game of the products, practices and perspectives of the culture

o Listen to song and put illustrations in order or number the pictures

o Design a web site

o Design a brochure

o Write a four line song plot for CD liner notes

o Create an on-air talk show

o Present a symposium of art, music, or literature based on song topic

o Create a story board with words and graphics to tell story in song

o Compose an Ode to a simple object or to an idea in the song track

o Create a story about the song from a child’s view

o Explain the events in the song in different time frames

(Eddy, 2006a/b)

Coda

Activities using music or song lyrics should not be limited to fill-in, plug-in, cloze, or mechanized responses. Performance assessments using music and songs 1) generate or foster authentic discourse, 2) help students demonstrate understanding of the material, 3) engage students in negotiation of meaning, 4) provide prompts for utilizing prior knowledge, 5) solve a problem, 6) create a product, 7) transfer skills to application, or 8) encourage critical thinking skills. The best use of culturally authentic songs is through performance assessment within the communicative modes that will enable the learner in the above goals. As part of a unit, songs can reinvent the theme for learner, allowing the issue to be seen through multiple points of view with a more focused lens on the culture that composed the song. Play music and let your students sing; it may be their only contact with music in the curriculum. Alternating silence and sound over time, music is communication, both evolving and changing, rehearsed and improvised, perfected through performance.

References

ACTFL. (1999). Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (Vol. 2). Yonkers, NY: ACTFL. (Original work published 1996)

Adair-Hauck, B. (2006). The Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA): Connecting Assessment to Instruction and Learning. Foreign Language Annals, 39(3), 359-382.

Eddy, J. (2006a). Discover Languages through Song: Performance Assessment Set to Music. Paper presented at the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Salamanca, Spain.

Eddy, J. (2006b). Sonidos, Sabores, y Palabras. Boston: ThomsonHeinle.

Eddy, J. (2007). Children and Art: Uncovering Cultural Practices and Perspectives through works of art in world language performance assessment. Learning Languages, 12(2).

Fuchs-Holzer, M., & Noppe-Brandon, S. (Eds.). (2005). Community in the making: Lincoln Center Institute, the Arts, and Teacher Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Galloway, V. (1998). Constructing cultural realities: "Facts" and frameworks of association. In J. Harper, M. Lively, & M. Williams (Eds.), The coming of age of the profession (pp. 129-140). Boston: Heinle and Heinle.

Gardner, H. (1993). Frames of Mind (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1983)

Glisan, E. W., Adair-Hauck, B., Koda, K., Sandrock, S. P., & Swender, E. (2003). ACTFL integrated performance assessment. Yonkers, NY: ACTFL.

Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Holzer, M. F. (2005). Aesthetic Education Philosophy and Practice: Education Traditions. New York: Lincoln Center Institute.

Mc Tighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2005). Understanding by Design (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD. (Original work published 2001)

Morin, R., & Goebel, J. (2001). Teaching Strategies or Teaching Words. Foreign Language Annals, 34, 8-17.

National Standards in Foreign Language Education project. (2006). Standards for foreign language learning in the 21st century. Lawrence, KS: Allen Press. (Original work published 1999)

Shrum, J. L., & Glisan, E. W. (2005). Teachers Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction (2nd ed.). Boston: ThomsonHeinle. (Original work published 1994)

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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