Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°1, 353-359
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.48 353
APPLICATION OF POSITIVE P
SYCHOLOGY IN CLASSROOM TEACHING OF
VOCAL MUSIC
Yan Ye
*Abstract
Vocal music is a compulsory course for many music and art students. In addition to vocal skills, the students of vocal music should learn how to express their emotional experience actively in the form of music. This paper aims to improve the classroom teaching of vocal music based on the theory of positive psychology. Firstly, a questionnaire survey was conducted to analyse the status quo of classroom teaching of vocal music in Chinese colleges, and reveal the problems with the teaching process. Then, several application strategies of positive psychology were compared in terms of their impacts on vocal music teaching. The results show that the classroom teaching of vocal music has many problems, such as the lack of demonstration, insufficient evaluation and poor enthusiasm for learning; the positive psychology should be introduced to the classroom teaching of vocal music, using the hint function, infection function and strengthening function of positive
emotions; the proposed application strategy of positive psychology can greatly improve the students’ interest
in learning and their learning results. The research provides empirical evidences for promoting the effect of classroom teaching of vocal music.
Key words: Mental Health Education, Vocal Music Teaching, Teaching Strategy, Teaching
Effect.
Received: 17-02-19 | Accepted: 07-08-19
INTRODUCTION
Vocal music is a compulsory course for all music and art students. The basic skills, abilities and skills of vocal music have always been regarded as the focus of vocal music learning. However, many learners with solid vocal basic knowledge are barely satisfactory in vocal performances. This is related to the vocal music
learners’ psychological quality during the
performance, and also depends on whether they can perfectly express the connotations implied in the music itself (Kristjánsson, 2012). Music is the inner experience towards objective things, as an emotional art (Frisby, 2001). People's positive emotional experience also plays an important role in vocal music teaching.
The college of Music and Dance, Huaqiao University, Xiamen 361021, China.
E-Mail: [email protected]
Positive psychology, originated in the United States, is the discipline of studying people's positive qualities and strength. It has been widely used in school education (Parks, 2011). Zhaodan Xuan (Ekornes, 2015) introduced positive psychology into English teaching, and proved that positive psychology can increase the
students’ enthusiasm and establish a more
harmonious relationship between teachers and students through empirical research. Min Li (Nielsen, 2004) integrated positive institutions, positive personality traits and positive emotions of positive psychology into primary school music teaching, concluding that positive psychology is conductive to stimulating students' interest and potential in music learning and improving their independent learning ability. Fameng Zhou (Sharp, Hargrove, Johnson et al., 2006) pointed out that a positive emotional experience can help students integrate with the emotions of music and better perform vocal performance.
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Yingli Li (Bachorowski & Owren, 1995) believes that positive psychology helps students become the main body of the classroom and enhance their learning mood and interest. Based on relevant references (Bostanov & Kotchoubey, 2004), the feasibility of positive psychology in music teaching has been confirmed and recognized, and the theoretical and practical research results of positive psychology in vocal music teaching are also abundant, but it still fails to solve the problem fundamentally.
Based on the above analysis, this paper attempts to propose the application strategy of positive psychology in vocal music teaching. For this, it introduces positive psychology into vocal music teaching, and analyses the current situation of vocal music classroom teaching in
colleges and universities by using
questionnaires, as well as the main problems in vocal classroom teaching from two aspects: teacher and student. Finally, the empirical analysis shows that this strategy can effectively improve students' enthusiasm for learning and academic achievement, and realize the change of students from indifference to aggressiveness to classroom teaching.
ANALYSIS FOR CURRENT SITUATION OF VOCAL MUSIC CLASSROOM TEACHING
In order to understand the current situation of vocal music classroom teaching in colleges and universities, this paper selects 23 teachers and 325 students of vocal music from colleges in
Wuhan, Hubei Province, and conducts
questionnaire surveys. Through the analysis of the questionnaires, the specific problems in vocal classroom teaching in colleges were summarized.
Current situation of vocal music classroom teaching
Survey on the vocal music teacher teaching
Figure 1 shows the survey results on whether vocal music teachers make demonstrations to the students and they can enhance their emotional expression during the teaching process. It can be seen from the figure that the number of teachers who made demonstration and the number of teachers who strengthened their emotional expression to the students each time during the teaching process was only 2 and 1 respectively, and most of the teachers only occasionally demonstrated to the students or
integrated their emotional expression into the teaching process.
Figure 2 shows the survey results on whether the vocal music teacher pays attention to the student's emotional experience in the teaching process. It can be seen from the figure that only 8.7% of the teachers paid great attention to the students' emotional expression during the teaching process, while up to 47.8% only occasionally emphasized that students should pay attention to their emotional expression in vocal music learning.
Figure 1
.
Whether the students will
demonstrate
and
demonstrate
their
emotional expression during the teaching
process
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Rarely Sometimes
Often Every time
Whether to demonstrate to students Is it strong emotional expression during the demonstration?
Figure 2
.
Does the teacher pay attention to
the emotional experience of the students in
the teaching process?
4.4% 47.8%
39.1% 8.7%
Very concerned Emphasize Occasionally Rarely
APPLICATION OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN CLASSROOM TEACHING OF VOCAL MUSIC 355
Figure 2 shows the survey results on whether the vocal music teacher pays attention to the student's emotional experience in the teaching process. It can be seen from the figure that only 8.7% of the teachers paid great attention to the students' emotional expression during the teaching process, while up to 47.8% only occasionally emphasized that students should pay attention to their emotional expression in vocal music learning.
Table 1 lists the survey results on the guidance ability evaluation of vocal music teachers. It can be seen from the table that 5 teachers paid attention to the students' singing personality, and 15 teachers occasionally did; 2 teachers said that they occasionally bring their bad mood to the classroom teaching, another 4 teachers said that they rarely brought bad emotions into the classroom teaching, and 17 wouldn’t bring their bad emotions into the
classroom teaching.
Table 1. Survey results on evaluation and
guidance ability of vocal teacher
Option
Topic
Whether to pay attention to students' singing
personality?
Whether to bring bad emotions into classroom teaching?
Often 5 0
Sometimes 15 2
Rarely 3 4
Will not 0 17
Figure 3
.
Are students willing to participate
in the vocal classroom teaching?
26% 48%
14% 12%
Very willing to More willing General Unwilling
Survey on students' vocal music learning
Figure 3 shows the survey results on students' willingness to participate in the vocal
music classroom. It can be seen from the figure that only 26% of the students indicated that they are willing or very willing to participate in the vocal music classroom, and another 26% of the students are not; most students said that they will participate into classroom activity only when the teacher calls the roll.
Figure 4 shows the reasons for the students’
nervousness during vocal music practice and performance. 41.2% of students thought that their abilities are insufficient, 23.6% students are afraid that they will not perform well, and teachers or other students will laugh at them, and more than 60% of students believed that psychological quality is very important in vocal music practice and performance; with poor psychological quality, there will be problems such as out-of-tune, forgetting lines and cracking voice.
Figure 4
.
Reasons why students are nervous
during vocal practice and performance
0 10 20 30 40 50
All of the above Afraid of
others laughing Insufficient
ability Afraid to live
up to expectations
Problems in vocal music classroom teaching
1) Teachers’ poor motivation for
demonstration
Demonstration teaching plays an important guiding role in vocal music teaching. Each physical movement, facial expression and vocal skills of the teacher in the classroom will directly affect the students' learning effect and emotions. The survey results show that the
number of teachers in the classroom
demonstration and frequency are low, and even then, the demonstration may only emphasize professional skills without incorporating their own emotions, which will greatly affect the psychological and emotional experience of students in vocal music learning.
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2) Insufficient ability to evaluate and guide students' singing
The evaluation ability of vocal singing is one of the abilities for excellent vocal music teachers (Dmitrieva, Gelman, Zaitseva et al., 2008). If vocal music teachers can correctly point out the problems and guide students in the vocal learning process, it will greatly help the students for their vocal music learning. Also, teachers should not use a single evaluation criterion to evaluate all students, but focus on different students' different singing and performance personality.
3) Poor self-regulation ability in the teaching process
The survey results show that a small number of teachers bring their own emotions into the vocal music teaching. In addition, it’s found that
some teachers even carry the mobile phone to the classroom, and interrupt the classroom teaching for answering the phone; after receiving the call, their emotional fluctuations are relatively large, which results in not only the delays of the teaching progress, but also ignoring the emotional expression of students during the performance process, thereby seriously affecting the students' learning status and teaching quality.
4) Students’ lack of learning enthusiasm and learning for exams and employment
Most students are not interested in the teaching content of vocal music classroom, and are unwilling to participate in classroom activities; they are obviously nervous in vocal performances. Due to a rush for success in exams and future employment, the students focus on the skill training during the practice, and they
purely sing songs for singing, but they don’t
know enough about the cultural background and connotation of the works they perform, ignoring the expression of their true emotions.
APPLICATION RESEARCH OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN VOCAL MUSIC TEACHING
Rational application of positive psychology in vocal music classroom teaching
According to the existing problems in the vocal music teaching of colleges, this paper puts forward the specific application strategy of positive psychology in vocal music classroom teaching (Panksepp, 2000), as shown in Figure 5. 1) Cultivate students' keen insight with hint function of positive emotion
In the teaching process, vocal music teachers should select musical works with different emotional cue functions, and cultivate students' experience and perception of emotions through use of the strong and weak contrast, tonal explicitness, and emotional suggestion etc. Each vocal music works contains the different emotions and efforts expressed by the writer, as well as its unique structure and charm. Therefore, before singing a song, the first thing is to master and understand the lyrics, background and specific vocal structure, instead of blindly reading the music; the teacher should lead the students to engage in positive and emotional experiential teaching according to the content and structure of the song, listen more to the students' singing, and provide guidance according to their own characteristics.
Figure 5
.
Specific strategies for the application of positive psychology in vocal classroom
teaching
Use positive emotional infection to stimulate students'
interest in learning
Promote students' cognitive ability by using positive
emotions
Positive emotional experience teaching according to song content
Infect students by words and expressions Use limbs and actions to
infect students
Strengthen student professional skills Rational use of positive
psychology in vocal music teaching
Develop positive insights
with positive emotions Conduct positive emotional
experience teaching according to song structure
Emotional cognition of sublimation students
APPLICATION OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN CLASSROOM TEACHING OF VOCAL MUSIC 357
2) Stimulate students' learning interest with the infection function of positive emotion
Positive emotions have the function of infection. Therefore, in order to stimulate students' interest in learning, vocal music teachers should infect students through demonstration teaching in the classroom teaching process. It can be expressed specifically as follows: (1) Infect students with words and expressions; with different voices and tones, there will be great differences in the emotional expression of the same works. So, teachers should pay attention to the use of different expressions, words and intonations in the process of teaching and demonstration, affirm and encourage students for their good performance in time, and infect the students through their own love and enthusiasm of vocal music, so as to stimulates students' interest in learning. (2) Use limbs and actions to infect students; body language also plays an important role in vocal music teaching. Some content of vocal music practice cannot be fully understood only by relying on teachers' explanations and demonstrations. At this time, the teaching
should be supplemented with physical
movements such as appropriate gestures etc., allowing students to learn more intuitively; only when combined with the action or dance, some song-singing can fully express the artistic conception of the music. Thus, the students can be better influenced by the teacher through their demonstrations and actions, and integrated into the vocal music study.
3) Promote students' cognitive ability with the strengthening function of the positive emotions
Music is the people's inner experience of objective things, as an emotional art. In the process of teaching, vocal music teachers should always integrate professional skills and positive emotional experiences reasonably (Carpenter, Barnes, Dickinson et al., 2006), e.g., the song
Bang the Drums, which is cheerful in rhythm and
lively in emotion; the teacher can first experience the rhythm of the song by hand-pounding the table, and enable the students to find the weak and strong rhythm of the song; then, through their own demonstrations, students can master the melody of the songs, which can activate the classroom atmosphere, enhance the activities of teachers and students, stimulate students' interest in learning, and increase the participation of the classroom.
Application effect of positive psychology in vocal music classroom teaching
In order to verify the specific application effect of positive psychology in vocal music classroom teaching, this paper selects two natural classes of Grade 2 majored in music performance of one university, i.e., an experimental class and a control class, 35 students per class. The basic situation of these
students was investigated before the
experiment. The experimental class was taught by the vocal music classroom teaching strategy based on positive psychology, while the control class was by the normal teaching mode. At the end of the semester, the two classes were tested again using the questionnaires.
Figure 6 shows the attitudes of the two classes towards the vocal music classroom teaching activities organized by the teachers before and after the experiment. It can be seen from the figure that the enthusiasm of the two classes before the experiment is basically the same, indicating that two classes are appropriate to be selected as the research objects for comparative analysis; the enthusiasm of the students in the control class to participate in the classroom activities before and after the experiment did not change significantly, while that in the experimental class before and after the experiment differed significantly, i.e., the students actively participating in the classroom teaching activities of the teachers increased from the pre-experiment 20 % to 40%, the number of students who passively participated in classroom teaching activities decreased from 42.86% before the experiment to 34.26%, and the proportion of students who did not want to participate in classroom teaching activities decreased from 25.7% before the experiment to 14.3%, indicating that positive psychology can effectively promote students' interest in learning.
Figure 7 shows the statistical results of the academic performance of the two classes before and after the experiment. It can be seen from the figure that there is no significant difference in the academic performance between the two classes before the experiment, and also no significant changes in the academic performance of the control class before and after the experiment, but the number of excellent and good students in the experimental class have increased significantly after the experiment.
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0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Participate according to difficulty level
Don't want to participate
Was asked to participate Proactive
participation
Before the experiment After the experiment
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
50 Before the experiment
After the experiment
Participate according to difficulty level Don't want
to participate Was asked
to participate Proactive
participation
(a) Control class (b) Experimental class
Figure 7
.
Statistical results of academic performance of two classes before and after the
experiment
0 5 10 15 20
Pass Medium
Good Excellent
Before the experiment After the experiment
0 5 10 15 20
Pass Medium
Good Excellent
Before the experiment After the experiment
(a) Control class (b) Experimental class
CONCLUSIONS
Vocal music is a compulsory course for all music and art students. Positive emotional experience plays an important role in vocal music teaching. Based on the theory of positive psychology, this paper studies the application of mental health education in vocal music teaching. The specific conclusions are as follows:
(1) According to the current situation of vocal music classroom teaching, there exist many problems in the vocal music classroom teaching
such as teachers’ poor motivation for
demonstration, insufficient ability to evaluate and guide students' singing, poor self-regulation
ability in teaching process, students’ lack of
learning enthusiasm and learning for
examination and employment. Among them, learning for examination and employment is the main problem;
(2) Based on the survey results of the vocal music classroom teaching, the specific application strategies of positive psychology in vocal classroom teaching were proposed by using the hint function, infection function and strengthening function of positive emotions;
Figure 6
.
Statistics on the attitudes of two classes of students participating in the vocal
classroom teaching activities organized by teachers before and after the experiment
APPLICATION OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN CLASSROOM TEACHING OF VOCAL MUSIC 359
(3) The implementation effect of active psychology in vocal music classroom teaching shows that the application of positive psychology to vocal classroom teaching can effectively improve students' interest in learning and academic achievement, and realize students' changes from indifference to aggressiveness to classroom teaching.
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