There were two important outcomes from the author's recent research (2010) into effective use of music in the
English language classroom (in press). One suggested that there was strong support for use of music in the
language-learning classroom, but that there was actually very little occurring in most classrooms. Connected, but
a separate issue, implied that while many teachers intuitively felt music was beneficial in teaching English
language, there was also the perception that there was a lack of understanding of the theoretical underpinnings
that supported such a choice. Therefore, some educators felt unable to defend the decision to champion use of
music in the classroom to administrators, business English students or those in a predominantly exam focused
environment.
Salcedo (2010), after a survey of foreign language teaching journals, suggests there are “only a few articles on
the subject compared to multitudinous articles on other methodological ideas”. Other scholars have noted this as
well: Coe (1972) stated there have been no controlled music use in the language classroom experiments and
Griffee (1989), in an editorial introduction discussing why songs and music aren’t used more extensively in the
language classroom, suggests there exists a lack of theoretical perspective and empirically based research in the
field. I would propose that, while there has been some progress in this subfield, little has changed throughout the
past decades.