Eleanor Sweeney: "L2 Teachers' Conceptions of the Music-Language Relationship"

This virtual session explores L2 teachers’ conceptions of the relationship between language and music. As our earliest forms of organized communication, language and music have been the subject of lively philosophical debate since before the 5th century BCE. Drawing from quantitative and qualitative data, I will present various ways that L2 teachers describe this relationship, and how their understandings shape and are shaped by their use of music in their language teaching activities. L2 Teachers raised issues such as Which came first, language or music? Or are they the same? What is the role of music in our development as a species? Can you even teach language without music? Using every trick in my developing Zoom bag, I hope to encourage audience participation and interaction.