Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 1; January 03

Musical Activities

In the January 2003 Issue of HLT Clement Laroy and David Cranmer offered a first set of musical exercises. Here are some more.

Music in the form of songs has probably always formed a part of language learning and much has been written on the subject. But in the mid to late eighties we began to work on music in a different way: using wordless, mostly 'classical' music we sought above all to exploit the power of music to stimulate images for the inner eye. Once we had established this principle, there seemed to be endless possibilities. Musical Openings, when it was published, in 1992, ( Pilgrims-Longman), brought to teachers the fruits of our work and it has been extremely gratifying to see how both teachers and students have taken the ideas on board. Although the book is now out of print, a few copies are still available from www.amazon.co.uk. Below are a few of the activities to be found there.

David and Clem

If these articles interest you, Pilgrims offers courses in this area. Click here for more information.

1.9 Background music
2.4 Conversations about music
4.1 Prompting a story
7.1 Colours