Towards a Music-based Framework for Content and Language

Integrated Learning in Preschool

Luca A. Ludovico

and Claudia Zambelli

Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale, Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit

a degli Studi di Milano,

Via Comelico, 39 - 20135, Milano, Italy

Universit

a degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 - 20126, Milano, Italy

Keywords:

Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL, Preschool, Music, Multimedia, IEEE 1599.

Abstract:

This paper aims to discuss the applicability of the approach known as Content and Language Integrated

Learning (CLIL) to preschool. CLIL is a form of language immersion where the learners’ second language

represents the medium of classroom instruction. The novel idea is to use music and related multimedia con-

tents in order to foster bi- and multi-lingualism by addressing children aged from 3 to 6. In this context,

we will propose a computer-supported education environment which adopts IEEE 1599, an XML format

originally designed for the representation and synchronization of music and media contents. Its multi-layer

approach represents a valid tool to support multiple interconnected descriptions, thus fostering abilities and

reinforcement techniques typical of CLIL. Finally, we will present an example aiming to test the efﬁcacy of

the proposed approach in real-world use cases.

1 INTRODUCTION

Musical language is a sophisticated mean of expres-

sion: on one side, it is necessarily rooted in the

composer’s cultural background; on the other side, it

has an amazing capacity to take on forms that come

from the surrounding world, assuming new shapes

and identities. This relationship between identity

and otherness can reach extraordinary levels of artis-

tic perfection, providing a precious opportunity for

a lifelong education to the globalized world (Ferrari,

2012).

Music can be a powerful way to teach and learn

before reading and writing abilities have been ac-

quired. By scaffolding children’s early musical ex-

periences and investigations, their engagement in the

world of sound as well as their trans-modal redesign

of known literature and song repertoire help children

establish strong, conﬁdent, vibrant, and creative iden-

tities in learning, communication, and performance

(Tomlinson, 2013).

A new music pedagogy based on an integrated

approach is currently emerging. The goal is to en-

hance that educational cross-component able to inﬂu-

ence key aspects of the growth such as expressiveness,

autonomy and sociality, in accordance with the fun-

damental concepts of pedagogical activism (Dewey,

2005).

Music is able to inﬂuence the construction of per-

sonality because it promotes the integration of per-

ceptual, motor, affective, social and cognitive dimen-

sions (Willems, 2011) by relating basic aspects of hu-

man life (e.g., physiological, emotional and mental

spheres) with key elements of music (e.g., rhythm,

melody and harmony). The abilities of listening, ex-

ploration and analysis are fundamental for the devel-

opment of general meta-cognitive skills of the child,

such as attention, concentration, and control. In this

sense, music is both an opportunity and a crucial edu-

cational strategy. For example, through music young

students can develop the aspects of analysis and syn-

thesis, problematization, argumentation, evaluation

and application of rules. As it regards the ability to

read and understand, children have the possibility to

train their transcoding skills – moving from the mu-

sical domain to the verbal language – in order to de-

scribe what they heard (Branca, 2012).

Music-based pedagogy can be promoted by (and

through) technology. Ad hoc approaches, techniques

and devices can be employed to make children in-

teract with the world of sound, develop their cogni-

tive and social skills, learn how to transpose, listen,

look and discriminate sounds in meaningful learn-

ing contexts (Profumo, 2012). For example, musi-

cal games let children improve perceptual and motor

skills, grasp concepts, remember musical patterns, in-

Ludovico, L. and Zambelli, C.

Towards a Music-based Framework for Content and Language Integrated Learning in Preschool.

In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2016) - Volume 1, pages 75-84

ISBN: 978-989-758-179-3

vent ideas, experience music in group and build self-

conﬁdence (Young and Glover, 1998).

In our opinion, music and technology can be prof-

itably coupled to create multi-layer learning environ-

ments whose main goal is the integration of hetero-

geneous skills and abilities. Integration is a keyword

also for a teaching methodology known as Content

and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Conse-

quently, the idea discussed in this paper is to adopt

music as a means to convey contents as well as

cognitive abilities to young children in a computer-

supported CLIL context.

This work is structured as follows: Section 2 re-

calls the basic concepts about CLIL; Section 3 de-

scribes the state of the art about the adoption of CLIL

in conjunction with music and its current diffusion

as a preschool didactic tool; Section 4 is focused on

the MUSICLILY project, namely the framework that

implements the proposed approach; Section 5 intro-

duces the concept of multi-layer pedagogy resulting

from the previous discussion; Section 6 provides an

overview about IEEE 1599, namely the markup lan-

guage adopted to encode information in a multi-layer

and Web-compliant format; ﬁnally, Section 7 presents

a case study in order to test the efﬁcacy of our ap-

proach.

2 A SHORT OVERVIEW OF CLIL

The locution Content and Language Integrated

Learning (CLIL) refers to methodologies employed

in teaching situations where a second language is

used as a medium for teaching non-language content

(Mehisto et al., 2008). CLIL encourages a cross fu-

sion of didactic subjects – which currently is a rel-

evant educational trend (Coyle et al., 2010) – by

approaching subject contents through the target lan-

guage and acting as a bridge that connects learning

aspects into a coherent whole where interdisciplinary

elements prevail (Agolli, 2013).

The CLIL initiative was launched in 1994 in con-

junction with the European Commission. In fact, mul-

tilingualism was – and it is still – considered at the

heart of European identity, and in this sense languages

are seen as a fundamental cultural aspect of Euro-

pean citizenship (Directorate-General for Education

and Culture, 2006). The idea was originated by a dis-

cussion among experts, above all in Finland and the

Netherlands, on how to bring the language-learning

excellence typical of a restricted number of institutes

into mainstream government-funded schools and col-

leges.

CLIL aims to develop in children both lower and

higher order thinking skills, according to Bloom’s

taxonomy of cognitive objectives (Bloom, 1956).

CLIL is mainly focused on the latter skills, even if

these are dependent on an earlier acquisition of the

former abilities. Consequently, such a methodolog-

ical approach is more cognitively engaging for both

students and teachers. On one side, this fact may in-

crease the demands and difﬁculty of CLIL, but on the

other it also leads to increasing engagement and mo-

tivation (Pinner, 2013).

Another aspect to consider is the difference

between Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills

(BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proﬁ-

ciency (CALP). The acronym BICS refers to conver-

sational ﬂuency in a language, whereas CALP refers

to student’s ability to understand and express, in both

oral and written modes, concepts and ideas that are

relevant to success in school (Cummins, 2008). In

CLIL, teachers have to address CALP rather than

BICS, and students have to know content-speciﬁc vo-

cabulary for the topic they are learning (e.g., technical

terms), as well as a suitable language to carry out ac-

tivities during the lesson (e.g., sentence starters).

According to some researches, one of the key as-

pects in CLIL lessons is the input (Krashen, 1982;

Krashen, 1985). The second language (L2) offers

learners a substantial amount of comprehensible in-

put, essential for L2 acquisition. Content is conveyed

by the teacher as a way of facilitating understanding,

and the input is represented by the language to which

learners are exposed (Costa and Coleman, 2010). All

constructivist comprehension theories underline the

importance of input in the construction process. How-

ever, the input as such is not important for success-

ful processing, rather the signiﬁcance it has for the

comprehender is fundamental. Cognitive psycholo-

gists argue that a comprehender can only process in-

put successfully if he/she can relate it to what is al-

ready part of his/her body of knowledge. Social con-

structivists carry their argument even further: in their

opinion, only input in which the comprehender can

get engaged – or involved in – can be processed and

will ﬁnally lead to a construction which he/she can

make use of (Wolff, 2003).

In order to provide an effective input, educators

need to know what CLIL exactly is, mastering both

the methodology and a speciﬁc language for con-

tents. Consequently, speciﬁc professional training is

required for teachers. Among a number of initiatives,

it is worth citing CLIL4U

and the British Council’s

CLIL project.

http://languages.dk/clil4u/index.html

http://www.britishcouncil.org/europe/our-work-in-

europe/content-and-language-integrated-learning-clil

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

3 STATE OF THE ART

In this section we will focus on two aspects that are

fundamental for this proposal: i) CLIL in preschool

education, and ii) the use of music as a means to con-

vey content in a foreign language.

In most educational systems that encourage an

early study of a foreign language, preschool and

school curricular approaches are rather similar, usu-

ally consisting of general lessons that include foreign

culture, art and craft activities. A great importance is

given to the development of phonemic awareness and

vocabulary, and these goals are traditionally achieved

through reading and writing assignments.

In the educational systems open to CLIL experi-

mentation, this methodology is usually applied to sec-

ondary education (Costa and Coleman, 2013; Llinares

and Whittaker, 2006; Whittaker et al., 2011) or even

to academic learning (Strotmann et al., 2014). An in-

teresting review of CLIL across multiple educational

stages, ranging from primary to tertiary level, is con-

tained in (Dafouz, 2009).

Conversely, the application of CLIL to pre-

primary school is a relatively novel idea. In this sense

it is worth citing a pilot project in Spanish curricular

infant education described in (Esteban, 2015). An-

other relevant initiative aiming to examine the effects

of general L2 exposure vs. speciﬁc language exposure

was carried out in a semi-private school located in

Lleida. Since this institute offers preschool, primary

and secondary schooling – thus covering three edu-

cational stages – the experimentation involved very

young students who were monitored in their progress

and performances (Saladrigues and Llanes, 2014). Fi-

nally, reference (Haces Tam

es, 2015) proposes the use

of nursery rhymes as resources to teach English in

preschool education through CLIL methodology. In

all the mentioned activities, CLIL has been consid-

ered effective not only to learn another language and

curricular contents, but also to foster cognitive devel-

opment, communication abilities and cultural aware-

ness in very young children (Sakurai, 2015; Sok

oł,

2015).

Didactic experiences designed for preschool ed-

ucation can encompass motivating games and short

activities to make children improve their listening

and speaking skills. Content learning in this early

stage of life is facilitated, and the acquisition of a

foreign language can be integrated into basic cur-

ricular topics such as numbers, colors, animals,

etc. (Fern

andez L

opez, 2014).

On the other hand, music is publicly recognized

as a universal feature of human cognition: every hu-

man is born with the ability to appreciate it (Brandt

et al., 2012). Music gives students motivation, cre-

ates a group and a good atmosphere for learning, al-

lows the development of language and communica-

tion abilities, prepares both the ear and the brain to

listen to, assimilate and produce sounds. Songs and

rhymes can be used to teach new words, increase vo-

cabulary, introduce a speciﬁc lexicon, and improve

pronunciation (Atta-Alla, 2012). Moreover, songs are

memorable for a long time. In this sense, a recent re-

search has conﬁrmed the long-held belief that singing

in a foreign tongue can facilitate language learning

(Ludke et al., 2014).

Music quite naturally provides opportunities to

practice patterns, math concepts, and symbolic think-

ing skills, all in the context of a joyful noise, which

makes it attractive and engaging even for very young

children. There are multiple and heterogeneous ways

to participate in music activities, and such experiences

can be easily adapted for a range of developmental

levels and skills depending on the learner’s age (Par-

lakian and Lerner, 2010).

Recalling the concept of input introduced in Sec-

tion 2, music lessons offer three distinct sources of

language input (Willis and Paterson, 2008):

1. the language used to manage classroom activities

and to set up music experiences;

2. the process itself that leads to a performance

(audience participation in rhythm games, use of

home-made instruments, etc.);

3. the actual words and phonological features of

songs, rhymes, musical stories, etc. performed by

the audience or already available as media con-

tent.

Finally, it is worth underlining the availability of

research results about the integration of music in

CLIL experiences (Kunc

rov

a and Vojtkov

a, 2013),

but mainly as a diversiﬁcation of music lessons in

secondary school. Besides, these works do not take

into account the possibilities offered by information

and communication technologies, an aspect that con-

versely will characterize our proposal.

4 THE MUSICLILY PROJECT

MUSICLILY is a project currently under develop-

ment at the Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale –

Universit

a degli Studi di Milano in cooperation with

external experts of the educational and pedagogic

domain. MUSICLILY aims to unveil original and

innovative ways to learn content and language in

preschool by using music as a privileged medium.

Towards a Music-based Framework for Content and Language Integrated Learning in Preschool

The ﬁnal goal is to design and implement a multi-

platform, publicly-available environment addressing

young learners. Because of their age, the approach

has to be playful and mainly based on visual ele-

ments and multimedia. Consequently, music, video,

and graphical contents will be integrated into a unique

framework explicitly designed to encourage CLIL. As

we will explain in Section 7, text contents can be em-

bedded too, in order to foster reading abilities even at

an early age.

Such a framework will be accessible on a wide

range of devices, including tablets and desktop com-

puters, interactive whiteboards, smartphones, etc.

Virtually any network-connected device equipped

with an HTML5 browser should be able to support

MUSICLILY.

In our vision, this framework will be suitable for

different purposes:

• As a way to introduce a speciﬁc topic from scratch

– While playing and experimenting the device in

a CLIL context, children will experience a stim-

ulating learning environment that integrates still

graphics, audio, video, etc.;

• As a learning reinforcement environment – Dur-

ing the exposition to a new lexicon, children will

ﬁnd a number of hints and multimedia stimuli to

deepen the meaning of new words and link them

to other domains (e.g., multiple translations of a

term, contextualizations of words through stories

and songs, etc.);

• As a playful evaluation tool – For example, at

the end of a CLIL session about a speciﬁc topic

(say farm animals), the teacher could ask stu-

dents to locate a given subject on the interface

(e.g., spelling out an animal’s name in another

language). In this way, the teacher can evaluate

if children have learned the meaning of lexicon

and realized the connection between the oral word

and the corresponding image. If results are not

satisfactory, reinforcement techniques can be em-

ployed as additional scaffolds.

Moreover, children can work alone, in pairs or in

little groups. When working with classmates, they

can experiment the so-called cooperative learning.

Social constructivism theories argue that knowledge

is acquired in a context, and – in this sense – coopera-

tive learning encourages the development of commu-

nication skills and positive interdependence (Coonan,

2007).

MUSICLILY aims to make children the protago-

nists of their learning. Since it is available on any

network-attached device, the proposed learning ap-

proach does not necessarily occur only in a classroom.

Preschool learners can ﬁnd a “red thread” from school

to their every-day life, thus applying what they expe-

rienced at school also to other contexts. For example,

activities occurring at home may involve also parents

in the learning process.

Needless to say, this initiative implies both the-

oretical and practical problems. As it regards the

former aspects, mainly concerning pedagogical ap-

proaches and technological challenges, we are ad-

dressing them in the present paper. Conversely, the

latter aspects require further investigation and will be

discussed after the release of an early version. Nev-

ertheless, in Section 7 we will provide a concrete ex-

ample of content encoding and a discussion about its

possible uses.

5 A MULTI-LAYER

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH

Considering the psychological and cognitive charac-

teristics of young people, preschool contents must be

organized from a global, comprehensive and interdis-

ciplinary perspective rather than developing CLIL in

unrelated areas. Such an approach – focused on spe-

ciﬁc topics but covering cross-curricular contents –

seems the most effective model to be implemented in

a bi- or multi-lingual preschool class.

As stated in (Glu

sac, 2012), CLIL exists in differ-

ent guises on a continuum where content-based edu-

cation is at the softer end and bilingual education is

at the harder one. As a consequence, we can recog-

nize hard or strong CLIL, where teaching and learning

are primarily content-driven, and soft or weak CLIL,

which is mainly language-driven. The version we are

adopting stands in the middle, thus it is sometimes

referred to as mid or comfortable CLIL: its aims are

dual-focused and learning occurs as a combination of

both language and content.

Moreover, our goal is to realize a multi-layer ped-

agogical environment based on the role of music not

only as a privileged medium to convey content, but

also as a way to create a complex network of cor-

related information. In fact, a class is composed by

many children, each one presenting his/her own way

to learn. In accordance with the theory of multiple

intelligences presented in (Gardner, 2011), we want

to provide multiple inputs, multiple interaction modes

and multiple ways to employ this environment, so that

the resulting learning experience can be a student-

tailored one.

The current proposal can be deﬁned “multi-

layered” because, given a speciﬁc topic, it embraces

different methods and media - each one with its

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

own features, granularity and level of abstraction - to

achieve the ﬁnal educational goal. Foreign langua-

ge, music and technologies are the main actors that

are used in an integrated manner to foster a stratiﬁca-

tion of skills, in accordance with Coyle’s four Cs

(Coyle, 2002): Communication (i.e. improving over-

all target language competence), Content (i.e. learn-

ing the knowledge and skills of the subject), Culture

(i.e. building inter-cultural knowledge and understan-

ding), and Cognition (i.e. developing thinking skills).

In order to achieve this goal, we give a particu-

lar importance to the Vygotsky’s theory of Zone of

Proximal Development (ZPD). Such a concept, pre-

sented in (Vygotsky, 1978), establishes two develop-

mental levels in the learner: the actual developmental

level, which is determined by what the learner can do

alone, and the potential level of development, which

can be established by observing what the learner can

do when assisted by an adult or a more capable peer

(De Guerrero and Villamil, 2000). ZPD is strictly

connected to scaffolding, namely a set of strategies

and instruments encouraging an interaction between

teacher and learner that helps young students to build

or improve their knowledge (Berk and Winsler, 1995).

Computer-based solutions and technological de-

vices can be the answer to the mentioned needs, since

they can implement those audio-visual aids required

to involve young learners and overcome the typical

problems caused by a new language in preschool-

age children. In addition to traditional resources al-

ready in use at schools (blackboards, textbooks, pup-

pets, etc.), technological resources such as interactive

whiteboards and the Internet can foster the acquisition

of linguistic competence in an entertaining and moti-

vating way. As stated in (Coyle et al., 2010), CLIL

requires to organize cognitively challenging materials

by providing effective scaffolding supported by some

model-view-controller frameworks. Learning activi-

ties such as songs, dances, storytelling, etc. can be

presented orally and visually, but also through suit-

able media support (Garc

ıa Esteban, 2013).

In order to realize CLIL activities in a multi-layer

and computer-supported environment, we need: i) a

suitable digital format to represent music and music-

related information, and ii) a framework able to of-

fer an engaging learning experience to preschool chil-

dren. These aspects will be discussed in the next sec-

tions.

6 THE IEEE 1599 FORMAT

IEEE 1599 is a standard internationally recognized by

the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

(IEEE), sponsored by the Computer Society Stan-

dards Activity Board and designed by the Technical

Committee on Computer Generated Music.

IEEE 1599 employs XML (eXtensible Markup

Language) to describe a music piece in all its aspects

(Baggi and Haus, 2009). The goal of the format is

to provide a comprehensive description of music and

music-related materials referring to the same music

piece within a single document.

Comprehensiveness in music description is real-

ized through a multi-layer environment. The XML

format provides a set of rules to create strongly struc-

tured documents, thus IEEE 1599 can implement the

multi-layer feature by arranging music and music-

related contents within six layers:

1. General – Music-related metadata (i.e. catalogue

information about the piece);

2. Logic – Logical descriptions of the original score

in terms of music symbols (e.g., notes, rests, ar-

ticulation signs, etc.);

3. Structural – Identiﬁcation of music objects and

their mutual relationships resulting from musico-

logical analyses or other kinds of investigation;

4. Notational – Score graphical representations (e.g.,

different editions, part extractions, piano reduc-

tions, etc.);

5. Performance – Computer-based descriptions and

automatic performances of music (e.g., MIDI or

MPEG4 formats);

6. Audio – Digital or digitized audio/video tracks

(e.g., complete recordings with different perform-

ers, audio covers, excerpts, etc.).

In order to provide a rich network of intercon-

nected and synchronized descriptions of the same en-

tities, music events are uniquely identiﬁed in the en-

coding. In this way, they can be described multiple

times in different layers (e.g., the graphical aspect of

a chord and its audio performance) as well as mul-

tiple times within the same layer (e.g., different per-

formances of the same chord). In formal terms, the

multi-layer environment provided by IEEE 1599 si-

multaneously supports two synchronization modes:

1. An Inter-layer Synchronization, that takes place

among contents described in different layers,

where heterogeneous categories of information

(i.e. additional descriptions of the same entities)

are stored;

2. An Intra-layer Synchronization, that occurs

among the contents of a single layer, where homo-

geneous information (i.e. concurrent and/or alter-

native descriptions of the same entities) is stored.

Towards a Music-based Framework for Content and Language Integrated Learning in Preschool

Synchronization is not strictly required: an IEEE

1599 document would be valid even if it does not con-

tain synchronizable media objects. Nevertheless, this

format shows all its potential when the document is

rich both in homogeneous and in heterogeneous de-

scriptions of the same music entities.

A detailed description of IEEE 1599 is beyond the

scope of this work. For further details, please refer to

the ofﬁcial IEEE documentation or to scientiﬁc works

that cover speciﬁc aspects of the standard (Baggi and

Haus, 2013).

One of the typical application ﬁelds of IEEE 1599

is music education, as discussed during the 4th In-

ternational Conference on Computer Supported Edu-

cation (Barat

e and Ludovico, 2012). In the past, the

format and its related technologies have been adopted

to foster the acquisition of music skills. Conversely,

using music as a tool to scaffold extra-music abilities

and knowledge is an innovative aspect of the current

proposal. In this sense, IEEE 1599 is suitable for the

MUSICLILY initiative for a number of reasons:

• It is an international standard explicitly designed

to represent music content, and MUSICLILY is

exactly focused on the use of music in CLIL con-

text;

• It is ﬂexible enough to host not only music, but

also a great number of related materials, including

still graphics, video, and text. The characteristics

of IEEE 1599 let programmers design and imple-

ment rich and engaging environments, as required

by the preschool audience expected for MUSI-

CLILY;

• It supports full synchronization among embedded

contents, a feature that can be exploited to rein-

force learning;

• It is XML-based and consequently fully compli-

ant with W3C recommendations for Web applica-

tions. In fact, already-available IEEE 1599 play-

ers have been realized through W3C languages

and formats such as HTML5, JavaScript, and

PHP;

• It is a free format, well documented by dedicated

Web sites and portals, ofﬁcial speciﬁcations and

scientiﬁc papers.

These aspects will be discussed and exempliﬁed

through the following case study.

7 CASE STUDY

In order to test the efﬁcacy of our proposal, we will

apply a music-based and computer-supported CLIL

methodology to a speciﬁc topic, namely the teach-

ing of farm animals in one (or many) foreign lan-

guage(s). Farm animals provide a typical lesson sub-

ject in preschool learning, often reinforced by multi-

media learning materials or visits to animal exhibits,

zoos and museums (Tunnicliffe, 1995).

The ﬁnal goal will be to design and implement

through a computer-based approach a multimedia les-

son about farm animals, where multilingual audio is

used to link and synchronize a number of related mul-

timedia contents.

Music and sound can be key elements in this

kind of educational initiatives. For example, the pro-

nounce of animal names implies a listening activity,

animals themselves produce sound (whose transliter-

ation sometimes differs signiﬁcantly from language to

language), there are songs and rhymes about animals,

etc.

As discussed in Section 6, IEEE 1599 can be

used to aggregate and synchronize information. It

has been conceived for music-centered descriptions,

nevertheless extensions to ﬁelds such as live theatrical

performances (Barat

e et al., 2012), city soundscapes

(Ludovico and Mauro, 2009), and concert promotion

(Barat

e et al., 2015) have been investigated in the past.

The common thread that links these extended uses of

the format is the centrality of music and audio. In this

case, instead of describing a music score, an IEEE

1599 document is used as a sound-driven aggregator

of information related to farm animals. This process

requires a reinterpretation of some aspects of the for-

mat, as detailed below.

7.1 From Music Symbols to Farm

Animals

In a traditional IEEE 1599 representation, we would

ﬁnd a logic description of music events (typically

notes and rests), and the possibility to link lyrics,

music scores and audio tracks. If we were able to

adapt the meaning of such concepts in response to our

needs, then we could beneﬁt from the multi-layered

approach of IEEE 1599, as well as reuse the soft-

ware tools already available to create, view and in-

teract with content.

Let us review in this new light the six-layer struc-

ture presented in Section 6:

1. General - Now this layer can list author infor-

mation, lesson title and details, and link the ad-

ditional lesson materials that cannot be synchro-

nized to audio contents;

2. Logic - Since IEEE 1599 speciﬁcations do not

provide a strict interpretation for the concept of

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

event, we can adapt it to our speciﬁc needs. For

example, if a storytelling or a song will pro-

vide the canvas, each scene, or line, or word, or

phoneme, or even note (when music is available)

can be considered as an event to be identiﬁed

and encoded. Please remember that the events in

the Logic layer are the anchors available for all

other descriptions within the remaining layers: the

choice of the granularity is strategical. This layer

allows also the encoding of lyrics, so the text can

be transcribed into written form, too;

3. Structural - For our purposes it is unlikely that this

layer is ﬁlled;

4. Notational - All the graphical representations that

can be synchronized to lesson contents should be

put here. Purely by way of example, such rep-

resentations can include a transcription of animal

names and/or sounds (also in different languages),

a picture version of the storytelling and its trans-

lations, interactive animal drawings and mapped

scenes accompanying the reading, a simple score

for the music tune (if available), etc.;

5. Performance - For our purposes it is unlikely that

this layer is ﬁlled;

6. Audio - All the audio and video objects that can

be synchronized to lesson content should be put

here. Purely by way of example, such represen-

tations can include multilingual audio tracks for

the storytelling, live recordings of animal sounds,

vocal sketching of animal sounds by people from

different Countries, short video clips showing real

animals in their habitat, etc.

The examples above give only a broad idea of the

rich learning environment that can be realized through

IEEE 1599. Heterogeneous contents can be used to-

gether in a fully synchronized environment as scaf-

folding and reinforcement elements.

7.2 Towards a Multimedia-integrated

CLIL Experience

The ﬁnal goal of MUSICLILY is to release a Web-

based prototype publicly available on a wide range

of network-attached and browser-equipped devices.

Actually, a Web application that supports IEEE 1599

and provides users with advanced tools to enjoy mu-

sic in a multi-layer environment is already on line,

but its Music Box area mainly addresses traditional

scores. From one side this implementation shows that

the approach discussed so far can be concretely im-

plemented, but on the other side we ﬁrmly believe that

http://emipiu.di.unimi.it/

preschool CLIL requires an ad hoc interface. Conse-

quently, our future efforts will consist in a children-

oriented customization of the existing technological

framework.

Another problem to solve is the possibility for

teachers to prepare student-tailored materials, possi-

bly with little effort in terms of time and money re-

sources. Unfortunately, available IEEE 1599 author-

ing tools – being focused on music – are not com-

pletely adequate yet. For instance, the list of events

of the Logic layer has to be produced manually, while

in the music case it would be automatically exported

from a notation software through a plug-in. Con-

versely, as it regards audio and graphical mapping

tools, also for music the current approach is not fully

automated, but only computer-aided: music symbols

have to be manually identiﬁed in the score, and sim-

ilarly tempo has to be tapped while listening to the

audio track. As a consequence, even if materials are

clearly different, the use of mapping tools does not

substantially differ and they can be easily reused in

this new light.

7.3 An Example

For the sake of clarity, we prepared an example for a

hypothetical lesson on farm animals in a multilingual

class. The canvas is a simple story about a day in a

farm, when animals are awakened by the crowing of

the cock.

In this context, the logic events – namely those

events whose occurrence triggers synchronization

among heterogeneous contents – could be the verses

of the tale. This is not a ﬁne granularity indeed, but

it is precise enough to enable a number of features, as

detailed below. Please note that the choice of a master

language is not required, provided that each localized

version of the tale contains the same number of verses

with comparable semantics. Consequently, the name

of logic events should be generic (e.g., verse 01,

verse 02, etc.), since the details about their seman-

tics (e.g., the verse itself translated in multiple lan-

guages, its pronunciation, etc.) are demanded to other

layers.

As it regards visual contents, we embedded and

mapped a number of pictures containing not only the

graphical representation of animals, but also localized

strings with their names and sounds, one drawing per

language. During fruition, mappings become evident

to the user through highlight effects on animal shapes

and/or labels. For the sake of clarity, in our example

we adopted only English and Italian as reference lan-

guages, but inter-layer synchronization would support

countless alternatives, thus going far beyond bilin-

Towards a Music-based Framework for Content and Language Integrated Learning in Preschool

Figure 1: Two alternative graphic ﬁles contained in the No-

tational layer and showing animal sounds in English and

Italian language respectively.

gualism. If on one side we could expect differences

among animal names in different languages, some rel-

evant discrepancies in the onomatopoeic translitera-

tion of their sound are quite surprising. For instance,

let us compare the cock’s crow shown in the upper and

in the lower part of Figure 1: “cock-a-doddle-doo” vs.

“chicchirich

ı”.

As it regards audio contents, they currently in-

clude the Italian and the English version of the tale,

properly linked verse per verse to the corresponding

logic events. Besides, for each animal sound we pro-

duced both a real recording and a number of vocal

sketches by native speakers.

Unfortunately XML documents are too verbose to

include a complete code listing, even for a simpliﬁed

example like this. However, the IEEE 1599 docu-

ment and all related multimedia objects have been

integrated into a compressed archive that is available

at the following URL:

http://www.lim.di.unimi.it/download/clil example.zip.

Such a complex network of linked information

fosters multiple fruition models. First, it is possible

to launch a listening activity in any language and pas-

sively watch one of the visual representations, where

graphical elements are properly highlighted and/or re-

placed by new ones in accordance with synchroniza-

tion. For instance, when an animal is mentioned in

the tale, its shape is colored on screen.

Another fruition model is to change either audio or

graphical contents in real time, for instance switching

from a language to another, or from a kind of repre-

sentation to an alternative one. In this way, when an

animal is cited the user can choose to watch one of the

still drawings or one of the video fragments without

losing synchronization.

Finally, it is possible to interact with contents, for

instance by clicking on sensitive areas of the interface

and causing a prompt response by the system. An ex-

ample of fruition is to let children click animal shapes

and labels, thus triggering one of the audio documents

associated, so as to create a mind association among

shapes, graphemes and phonemes in a foreign lan-

guage.

This kind of experience can be further im-

proved thanks to additional stimuli accompanying

the computer-based solution. For example, teachers

can encourage learning by distributing extra materials

(e.g., printable coloring pages, like the one shown in

Figure 2), or organizing activities such as classroom

games, cultural visits, and school trips.

Figure 2: Additional material to reinforce learning: a print-

able coloring page.

8 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this work we have described an educational pro-

posal based on the integration of three domains: in-

formation technology, music, and foreign languages.

Since our approach makes them tightly intercon-

nected each other, it can be difﬁcult to establish the

exact role played by each of them. In fact, each do-

main can be seen as the input, the medium or the ed-

ucational goal of the initiative.

For instance, if we wanted to implement a stan-

dard form of CLIL, namely a learning experience

where a speciﬁc topic is treated in a foreign lan-

guage, then audio could provide the input (e.g., a

CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

song, a nursery rhyme, a narration, etc.) and com-

puter tools could be used to implement multimedia

fruition. Alternatively, interaction with technologi-

cal devices could be seen as the input, while music

or other multimedia contents as a way to encourage

an early use of technologies within a playful environ-

ment. Similarly, a learning experience could address

educational aspects that go beyond the speciﬁc topic

– in this case a given school subject would be the in-

put – including for instance computational thinking or

multi-layer fruition of contents.

As a ﬁnal remark, let us focus on the concept of

language cited in the deﬁnition of CLIL: it is worth

underlining that not only a foreign language in a strict

sense, but even music, computer languages and for-

mats, and human-computer interaction models can be

seen as alternative forms of expression. This com-

plex network of interconnections among heteroge-

neous domains, as well as the versatility of the roles

played by each component, can be easily justiﬁed

through the multi-layer approach mentioned above.

The use of music as a playful and engaging way

to convey information on one side, and the support

obtained from computer technologies on the other are

fundamental to involve young learners in CLIL ac-

tivities, such as in a preschool context. Moreover,

lesson topics can be suitably chosen in order to get

further beneﬁts from this articulated approach. For

example, if the lesson is about musical instruments or

city soundscapes, a multimedia environment where a

music-oriented format plays a key role will prove to

be a ﬂexible, powerful and effective learning tool.

As it regards future work, please note that – at the

moment of writing – MUSICLILY is only an educa-

tional proposal. Both the pedagogical bases and the

technical aspects have been already explored, and re-

search has shown promising prospects, but ad hoc im-

plementations and validation activities are required to

test the efﬁcacy of our approach.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to acknowledge the members of the

Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale for their partic-

ipation in the IEEE 1599 initiative. MUSICLILY is

a research project partially funded by the Universit

degli Studi di Milano.

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