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.
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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.
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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 fillin 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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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