Work in progress — Singing your way to better communication skills — Music in engineering english

The paper is based on a project launched in Hindustan Institute of Technology & Science, Chennai, India in 2009. It details an innovative methodology to teach English and improve interpersonal relations in a multilingual classroom using music taken from popular English culture. English language learning has been limited to English for Specific Purposes in the Engineering community in India since the last three decades. The paper studies how successful music is, as a mediational tool in teaching the language, specifically in improving spoken English. The improvement in speaking skills of 41 students is recorded from July 2009 to December 2010. Music is used as a means to bring intrinsic motivation and acculturation among learners and to utilize multiple intelligences of the learner by introducing audio visual perceptions of a foreign culture. The preliminary result shows that there is improvement in the speaking skills of the learners.