Critical Languages Song Project
Use your ears! Use your voice!
Dig deep into songs for the cultural knowledge they compress. In the Critical Languages Song Project, songs are both the object of study and a stepping off point for broader discussion and writing. Materials are presented in a specially designed computer interface. Rich annotation supports baseline advanced learners, while a broad range of contextual content in various media spurs directed exploration among more fluent reader/listeners who have spent time abroad. Songs run the gamut from 1930s popular music to bards, rock and other contemporary forms.
What We Offer
An advanced one-semester course in culture and language tailored to the needs and concerns of the language and culture you are studying. Courses are available in Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Russian.
Courses are structured around a carefully chosen, richly annotated corpus of songs and supplied with a full pedagogical apparatus and a broad range of contextual content in various media.
Presented in an innovative, specially designed computer interface. Materials are available to instructors for full-course adoption or integration into existing courses as self-standing modules. Our model is also readily adaptable to other languages through a downloadable template and design tools. All materials are available to students and instructors at no cost.
Song/units include the following segments, with some variation based upon language
- Introduction
- Listening
- Text/Notes/Context
- Questions for understanding
- Grammar
- Topics for discussion and writing
- Suggestions for further listening
Each course is made up of between 14 and 21 songs. These courses are intended for use primarily by 4th-year university students.
Guiding Principles
Songs are compact, authentic, burgeoning with cultural and linguistic information. Because they are situated in the social, cultural, economic and political discourse of their language communities, when we embed them in a contextualizing and interdisciplinary network of texts, they have the potential to rapidly and effectively bring students into this discourse and engage them with a range and variety of cultural voices. Because of their "stickiness" or memorability, songs may be easily internalized, providing grammatical-syntactic models for language production; because of the lack of visual cues (unlike film), songs are conducive to a precision focus on discrete forms often missed in running speech because of their lack of saliency to learners. Equally important, songs, when properly scaffolded through learning tasks and placed within “webs of significance” via rich contextualizing material (paintings, historical documents, newspaper articles, poems and literature excerpts, interview or broadcast segments, etc.), become a lens to view the target culture from many angles and in many layers.
In addition to developing students’ linguistic skills and specific cultural knowledge, we believe these materials will help students gain an understanding of the discursive nature of cultural texts, which we have defined in terms of seven Cs: Context, Condition, Chorus, Conflict, Connotation, Continuity, and Comparison.
The Seven Cs
Vicki Galloway and Stuart Goldberg
A knowledge of the song’s generating context; that is, its time and place in the world, its sociohistorical backdrop or political climate;
A sense of condition; that is, some understanding of the situation(s), issues and agendas that birthed the song within this context (nostalgia, angst, playfulness, protest);
An identification of chorus; that is, the heterogeneous voices evoked by the performance of a song in its original cultural context. These often-overlapping voices include the “authorial” voices of composer and lyricist, the narrative voice(s) projected by the text, the variegated voices of the song’s original historically- and culturally-situated audience(s), both actual and implied, all of whom are subsumed into the sonorous voice of the singer.
A recognition of the nodes of conflict through which these voices at times express themselves; that is, the culture’s tension points where potentially competing values, perspectives, visions internal to the culture clash and, ultimately, generate the seeds of culture change;
An understanding of connotation; that is, the impact of factors such as the aforementioned on giving in-group meaning to words, the sense of a word that cannot be found in a dictionary query. The notion of connotation includes silence as well as sound, the pause as well as the utterance, particularly in the case of high-context cultures (Edward T. Hall);
An appreciation for the role of song in constructing and sustaining continuity of community identity and group cohesion; that is, the personal associations and emotional content that define communities of collective knowledge and experience within the target culture and demonstrate the diversity of overlapping identities and allegiances in society;
The ability to make non-judgmental and contextualized comparison of perspectives and their practices both within and between cultures. Students should be guided to see how the views expressed in a particular song relate to the views of other groups (of age, nationality, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, etc) or of other eras.
In addition, aspects of style, such as instrumentation, vocal timbre, pitch (melody, harmony, register), rhythm and compositional form expose cultural traditions that may have deep historical and/or spiritual significance, while cultural/musical fusions illustrate the porosity of borders and the impact of itinerant and immigrant voices. It is the goal of our course modules to organize this cultural knowledge as it relates to a carefully chosen corpus of songs and to scaffold student exploration of and engagement in song through listening, reading, writing and speaking tasks, for the purpose of stimulating linguistic awareness, growing communicative precision, and generating expanding tracts of dense cultural knowledge.
The Critical Languages Song Project thus employs an interdisciplinary approach that merges culture, content and language in a learner-centered environment of the type specifically called for by the ACTFL Standards for Foreign Language Learning.
Contact Us / Request Access
Access is provided at no charge to instructors and, through them, students for use in university-based courses. Access may be granted on a case-by-case basis to independent learners with a bonafide educational need. For review or to adopt, please send your current affiliation and a brief description of your background and intended usage to:
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Russian and general inquiries
Stuart Goldberg -
Arabic
Rajaa Aquil -
Chinese
Paul Foster -
Japanese
Rumiko Shinzato
About Us
Four faculty experts – in Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese – creating, with the help of graduate students in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science, an innovative series of advanced course materials in language and culture through the prism of song.
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Stuart Goldberg
Project initiator and director, Russian materials designer -
Rajaa Aquil
Arabic materials designer -
Paul Foster
Chinese materials designer -
Rumiko Shinzato
Japanese materials designer -
Szu-Chia Lu, Se Hoon Shon and Niranjanaa Ragupathy
UI design and interaction programming
Copyright Notice
This site contains copyrighted material. Music, lyrics, images and media belong to the artists and companies that created and published them. They are being used here solely for educational purposes in homework assignments and face-to-face teaching in class. Any other uses are strictly forbidden. Users found using these materials for other than educational purposes will be blocked from using this site. If you have any questions, please contact Stuart Goldberg by email at stuart.goldberg(at)modlangs.gatech.edu .
Development of the Georgia Tech Critical Languages Song Project was funded through the generosity of a U.S. Department of Education International Research and Studies Grant, the office of the Georgia Tech Vice Provost for Research and the School of Modern Languages.