A discussion was held with Ranchi-based music creator and aritist Murari Sinha in Bengluru on teaching alphabet phonetically coupled with musical intelligence to acquire appropriate sounds and voice quality right from pre-school stage.
The following understanding got developed from the discussion and information processing.
The appropriate way to phonics at the foundational stage (age group: 3-8 years) for learning language should be through micro-poems, chants and clap rhyme games
The strategy of 'Singing Phonics' should be specially designed by the language teachers and music teachers looking for non-music use of musics such as speech correction by supporting phonic awareness and phonics method of teaching language to young children in an ideal interactive-imitative way.
In the Indian context, the 'dhrupad alaap' singing and the 'lapana in Karnatak music', could be suitable since they are un-metered styles and allow improvisation in the form of musicalization of sounds within a raga-form making it adaptable to the academic content.
The purpose of alap singing in the form of phoneme-alaap, word-alaap or micro-poetic or phrasal alaap (2-6 words) is to introduce phonic modes in a slow tempo in the beginning with a pattern of ascending scale but with different descending scales. Later, musical quality in the form of 'taan' or fast melodic passages can be introduced. Often, children have to progress from 'alaap to bolaap to boltaan to taan' for acquiring alphabet sounds with phonic awareness.
An 'alaap' and 'taan' singing includes the word—alap and improvised vocal phrase or micro-poem for practice leading the development of basic elements of musicalization such as rhythm (through emphasis and pauses), resonance (voice originating from chest, diaphragm, lungs and moving through vocal chords), inflection ( way to say a word with right stress on letter, right pronunciation and right rise and fall)in word clusters), and tempo (how fast or slow one speaks)
Implications of the discussion are in the form developing a few alaaps and taans as teacher training material by educator-musician duo and curricular material for classroom instruction by educator-teacher duo. The curricular material needs to be standardized after a few lesson studies.
In 'bol-alaap', spoken or vocalized words of a micro-poem are also improvised with notes. It is the improvisation of rendering structures that reveal the musical characteristics of the words in the poem. The poem can start with free improvisation part of which is called alap or prelude that sets the rendering atmosphere while the structured improvisation in wordy-part is called 'bandish' in vocal music. However, for phonics method of language teaching, prelude part is optional since emphasis is on language development rather than music.
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