The power of a child's home language

Way back when I was learning to be a high school music teacher, I remember feeling incredibly irritated by having to learn songs in foreign languages (including one Aboriginal song which was never even translated for us by the tutor).  I honestly couldn't see the point of the exercise.  It wasn't that I was bad at languages- in fact I was brought up with a French-speaking grandmother, and I studied three languages at high school. I just couldn't see that singing in other languages was meaningful or useful as a teaching tool- it seemed to detract from the study and enjoyment of the music itself.

Back then, the likelihood of striking a genuinely multicultural classroom was much lower.  We were taught ethnomusicology (the study of other cultures' music) as an academic discipline, not as anything that related to our ability to connect with the children.

Come to think of it, I don't think connecting with the children got a look in at all- teaching was an intellectual process for my lecturers, and the idea of trying to touch the children's hearts with music as a learning tool was a radical concept.  Their view, I think, was that we needed to sing in other languages in order to nurture the future opera singers we met in our classrooms.  (As if.)

These days, though, I'd like to go back and bang my old lecturers' heads together, and ask them why on earth they didn't explain how important a working understanding of the language and music of other cultures could be in the classroom, on a human level. And last week I had cause to be rapt that I learnt that Aboriginal song- here's why.