Listening as a bridge for integrating music education and English language teaching to young learners: Students' perceptions

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine primary school students’ perceptions of an integrative teaching model that combines Music Education and English as a Foreign Language, with listening as the central skill in both subject areas. The study was conducted in May 2025 with a sample of fourth-grade primary school students (n = 56), who were interviewed immediately after the lesson. An exploratory research design with a qualitative emphasis, supplemented by descriptive quantitative data, was employed. The research objectives were to examine students' perceptions of the key elements of an innovative lesson. Students’ responses were analyzed qualitatively, and the findings indicated positive perceptions of the main elements of the instructional model: the use of a story in English as a motivational tool for listening to music, the integration of lesson stages through a shared task involving the connection of visual content with the story and the musical composition, and the application of vocabulary from the story when describing elements of the musical composition in English. These findings were complemented by quantitative results obtained from students’ performance on a test assessing their understanding of the musical composition and their ability to apply vocabulary from the story in a new context. Despite certain limitations, which are discussed in the paper, the findings suggest that students perceived the lesson positively and indicate the potential of the proposed integrative teaching model for Music Education and English as a Foreign Language, with listening as its central focus.