ON THE MOVE: MUSIC AND ENGLISH TOGETHER LEAD TO EFFECTIVE CLIL

Abstract

The present article reports on a study carried out with Primary Education students over a period of two consecutive years at a Bilingual state school in the Madrid Autonomous Community with a brief extension study in the third year. Our hypothesis was that the introduction of music in a CLIL context, where English was used, would enhance students’ motivation and performance. The project design and its implementation included the composition of musical material with lyrics related to Natural and Social Sciences in English, the use of different research techniques and the measure of the results with several assessment instruments. The findings clearly validate the hypothesis, since learners not only improved their marks in the subjects taught in English, but their perceptions towards the teaching areas also got better as a consequence of the introduction of real songs especially composed to help learning the contents that were introduced on a regular basis during the intervention period.