Date of Award
Spring 5-2013
Degree Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education
First Advisor
Rose Jones
Advisor Department
Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education
Abstract
There are a variety of different strategies educators have to choose from when deciding to teach a foreign language in their elementary school classroom. Although this is so, there are still educators who choose to rely on the traditional method of rote memorization. Interactive play allows the students to be hands-on when learning foreign language vocabulary rather than simply memorizing it. Music is also incorporated into interactive play to see its effects on retaining the knowledge students are learning. Both of these, music and interactive play, were used in this study to prove that the combination of the two is a better teaching strategy than rote memorization. The strategy was implemented for three days and there was one day of testing. The goal of this study was to see student score improvement in the class using the music through interactive play method over the rote method. Scores were calculated and analyzed by finding the class and individual averages of each class of students. A baseline was then found for each class. The study showed that adding music through interactive play to the foreign language vocabulary curriculum does, in fact, improve vocabulary retention scores.
Copyright
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Recommended Citation
Collins, Hayley M., "The Effects of Music on Foreign Language Retention in Elementary Schools" (2013). Honors Theses. 151.
https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/151