About these Authors
Matt May is a Web accessibility specialist, and has written on the interaction of people and technology since 1995. He keeps his own weblog at
bestkungfu.com, and produces a podcast called
Staccato, which features Creative Commons-licensed music.
Alex Williamsblogs, consults and produces unconference style events, where people immerse in DIY media. These are fun occasions, designed for people who want to get together with authors, artists, technologists and leading thinkers to converse, eat, listen to music, write, shoot photos and post podcasts and videoblogs. Alex also works with companies to establish DIY approaches, where writing, photography, voice and video come together to create new conversations and communities. Alex is currently fascinated with digital photography. His girlfriend calls him a Flickrholic. Send Alex a nice message: alexhwilliams at gmail.com.
Nicole Simon loves blogging and podcasting, dashed with an European view. As consultant she helps to facilitate such tools for business purposes or personal publishing empires. She can be found at
cruel to be kind and on her private blog
Useful Sounds.
Roland Tanglao is a well known podcasting enthusiast and a passionate advocate of blogs, RSS, and social software as a means of online expression for people, organizations and businesses. He is a prominent participant in the blogosphere and online communities and one of the founders of Bryght and as Bryght's Chief Blogging Officer reads hundreds of blogs daily. He graduated from the University of Waterloo, worked at Nortel Networks where he ran its first internal corporate blog, has has been blogging since 1999, and was the first business blogging consultant in Canada.
Alex Williams
Matt May
Nicole Simon
Roland Tanglao
1. Andrew Lodge on January 7, 2006 3:43 PM writes...
I would like to introduce you to an interesting new concept and one that we feel is a genuine breakthrough in language learning...
We recently appeared on a BBC Innovation TV programme and the Press, feedback from users of our system and educationalists alike has been more than enthusiastic - I do hope you find this an interesting read.
earworms (Musical Brain Trainer)....
‘Earworms’ is in fact the term used for those (annoying) catchy tunes that you just can't get out of your head and we have put this phenomenon to a positive educational use for languages...with a unique combination of music and scientific innovation.
Please visit: www.earwormslearning.com
earworms (mbt) - Accelerated learning - in a nutshell:
Ever wondered why you just can’t get that song out of your head? earworms uses this same brain function to boost the retention of words and phrases when learning a language. It's a well known fact that we use only a fraction of our brain power and traditional book learning is now recognised as not suiting every learner.
Course author Marlon Lodge (my brother) recognised this early on in the context of his teaching and has developed simple techniques which open up and exploit more of the brain's native power.
He explains: “Music is an ideal medium for learning. It gets to deeper subconscious levels of your memory, and most people really enjoy it….Although you feel that you are just listening to music, subconsciously you are taking in masses of verbs, nouns and connecting words, and picking up the correct accent all the time!â€
The idea is as simple as it is old. Before the age of writing, ancient historical events (e.g. in the Finnish sagas) were recorded in verse and song form for easy memorisation. In his book 'Songlines' Bruce Chatwin describes how the Australian Aborigines were able to navigate their way across hundreds of miles of desert to their ancestral hunting grounds without maps. And how? The extensive lyrics of their traditional songs were exact descriptions of the routes!
Rhythm and words, i.e. song and verse, have always been a very powerful memory aid, and this is supported by recent scientific research*. The advertising industry knows only too well how powerful music can be in getting the message across with brainwashing-like jingles and sound-bites.
What you learn. How the courses are structured.
earworms adopts the so-called lexical approach to language. In essence, this means we look at language in terms of whole meaningful chunks, then break these down into their component bite-sized, easily digestible, easily absorbable parts and then reconstruct them. You not only learn complete, immediately useful phrases, you also intuitively learn something about the structure (the grammar) of the language.
These ‘chunks' which the learner can ‘mix and match', gradually build up to cover whole areas of the language.
This may sound logical to the layman, but it is only very recently that this approach (as expounded by Michael Lewis in his book “The Lexical Approachâ€) has been taken up in the classroom.
In the March 2005 issue of the journal “Nature†researchers at Dartmouth College in the US reported that they had pinpointed the region of the brain where ‘earworms' or catchy tunes reside, the auditory cortex. They found that the sounds and words that have actually been heard can be readily recalled from the auditory cortex where the brain can perceptually hear or reconstruct them. Music, it seems, is the ideal catalyst to memorisation.
The reasons for lack of language learning motivation has a lot to do with our preconceptions – that it must be difficult, time consuming and dry, and this pretty much reflects the state of affairs in the UK language learning scene.
Given the widespread popularity of pop music especially in Britain, and the fact that music has been scientifically proven to be an excellent memory aid, earworms is a language learning tool ‘made in heaven’ for UK learners, especially young learners who the government has in its sights at the moment. The system has been extremely successful in classroom tests, and the resonance among teachers and pupils has been more than enthusiastic.
A common reaction has been “Why hasn't this been done before?†or “At last a learning product that really helps you to remember!â€
Imagine kids at school getting a CD of cool songs with all the historical dates or all the French verbs they have to learn, or all the countries and capitals of the world! Wouldn't that make their (and teachers') school lives much easier, much more fun, much more successful.
Rest assured we are working on it.
I welcome your comments...
Best Regards
Andrew Lodge
Managing Director
andrew@earwormslearning.com www.earwormslearning.com
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