engleski

Digital applied linguistics in teaching music theory

One of the most important tasks of teaching music theory is to teach students how to theorize themselves, regardless of their profile, because experts are expected to have the skill of competent verbalization of the material they deal with. A large part of today's youth, at least in the Republic of Croatia, does not (even) use their mother tongue skillfully enough, especially when it comes to linguistic expression, which is evidenced, among other things, by the poor results of external evaluation of written works, such as essays, which are an integral part of the state matriculation exam. School essays are mostly written in general language and do not require special specialist knowledge, in contrast to professional discourse, which implies a high level of knowledge of professional terminology and usage norms. As in any profession, in music theory there are established and codified ways of expression that depend a lot on the theoretical framework, the situation, the assumed or real audience to whom one is addressing, as well as many other factors. Each discursive context is determined by a special way of expression, which is particularly manifested at the lexical level, although it is not limited to it. It is possible to adopt an applicable norm appropriate to a specific discursive context intuitively, but in order for teaching and learning to be more conscious, successful and time- efficient, the long-term process of internalizing an applicable norm can be partially compensated by awareness of the legality of a particular discursive context. Digital tools for processing language corpora offer numerous possibilities for discovering these regularities based on written texts. The teacher can compile his own corpora of certain characteristics (area, time of publication, subject, age, language, etc.) in order to establish what usage norm is present in a particular discourse. Even with simple processing, one can determine which lexical units within one's own corpus can be considered key words and terms, how they are typically used in the profession, in which collocations they are most often used, which in turn often reveals the way of their conceptualization, especially conceptual metaphors in on which they rest. Furthermore, it is possible to follow the variation of the discourse depending on the type and function of the text corpus. Digital processing of the corpus facilitates the identification of similarities and differences in the meaning of individual partial synonyms in different languages and can serve as an aid in translating and understanding foreign texts. Today, the corpus approach is understood in terminological and lexicographical work, and as part of teaching music theory, the need to look at the lexicon is of crucial importance considering the abstract nature of most musical terms. The analysis can also determine which concepts, or topics, are dominant in which discursive context. Finally, by pointing out the linguistic peculiarities of the professional discourse, the teacher sensitizes the students to the characteristics of the language of the profession, both in other people's texts and in the language they use themselves. The presentation will show several simple procedures and tools that can be used to determine the basic characteristics of a written corpus. They can by no means replace a deep analytical insight into the written material, and during any analytical procedure the teacher must be aware of the limitations of the machine processing of language corpora. Despite this, digital applied linguistics can offer a basis for understanding discourse and enable the processing of an extremely large number of texts in a short time, which is particularly important considering the life rhythm of our time.

music theory ; language ; terminology ; discursive context ; digital tools ; corpus linguistics

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