“Judge Softly"

Abstract

Studio instruction in voice inevitably involves the monitoring of pronunciation in the text of the song or aria. The contrastive approach regularly applied in ESL instruction is a resource that can clarify systematically the differences between languages, especially for the student whose first language is not English. Instruction based on a firm basic knowledge of the sound pattern of a student’s first language—especially those outside the languages of the standard literature—provides an enhanced understanding of singing in languages other than the student’s own, more than imitative modeling alone can.