Using HeidiSongs Music as an Instructional Tool in the Elementary School Classroom: A Case Study

The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study is to understand how teachers use HeidiSongs music as an instructional tool in the elementary school classroom. HeidiSongs uses multisensory structured language education to teach by engaging multiple senses simultaneously to increase retention. The theories guiding this study include Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which involves kinesthetic intelligences among other types of intelligences, and Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition. HeidiSongs uses both musical and kinesthetic activities to enhance literacy. The central research question focused on how teachers use HeidiSongs music as an instructional tool in the elementary school classroom. The sub-questions explored the different instructional settings where this literacy instruction could take place: whole group, small group, and individual instruction. Eleven participants were current or former users of HeidiSongs music, and data was collected virtually through documentation, individual interviews, and a single focus group interview. Data was analyzed through cross-case synthesis, searching for patterns, forming naturalistic generalizations, and explanation building. Findings indicated HeidiSongs is most applicable in the whole group setting in the elementary school classroom, with teachers and students using recall of the songs in small group and individual worktime to enhance memory. Teachers enjoyed the combination of multisensory music and movement in HeidiSongs and reported an overall positive effect on student engagement, even in diverse populations. Further research on instructional data distinguishing between audio, visual, or animated versions of the songs could help teachers determine which version of the songs is most ideal for each classroom

Development of a deep learning system for hummed melody identification for BertsoBot

The system introduced in this work tries to solve the problem of melody classification. The proposed approach is based on extracting the spectrogram of the audio of each melody and then using deep supervised learning approaches to classify them into categories. As found out experimentally, the Transfer Learning technique is required alongside Data Augmentation in order to improve the accuracy of the system. The results shown in this thesis, focus further work on this field by providing insight on the performance of different tested Learning Models. Overall, DenseNets have proved themselves the best architectures o use in this context reaching a significant prediction accuracy

Using songs for beginners to learn Chinese : an action research study of local/global language education

Despite the previous research into the use of music, particularly songs, in teaching English, Spanish, and many other languages, the implication of employing songs in Chinese teaching classrooms is still under-developed. This research fills the gap in this area by combining pre-existing theories with practice in Sydney public school. Through examining student’s responses and feedbacks, the effectiveness of using songs in Chinese teaching is critically analysed, and the basic procedures in classroom use is generated. It is argued that since this pedagogy provides students with the opportunity to practice Chinese through entertaining and culturally rich songs, it enhances the learnability of Chinese as a second language. There are three major findings to support this argument: 1. The use of songs can aid in the recall of lexical input by producing mental repetition. 2. Through learning with supporting activities, students can be scaffolded to recognise and reconstruct grammatical structure. 3. Songs can provide motivations for students to explore Chinese and cultural learning. This thesis is part of the researches on the use of music in language teaching. It contributes to the future pedagogical researches regarding language teaching, especially Chinese teaching domain. More importantly, by engaging more students in Chinese learning, it can enhance the popularisation of Chinese in Australian schools