If you’ve ever caught yourself humming a tune in a language you don’t speak, you’ve experienced something language teachers have wondered about for decades: do songs actually help us learn vocabulary, or do they just feel like they do? It’s a fair question. Music is fun, memorable, and emotionally sticky, but “fun” and “effective” aren’t always the same thing in a classroom.

A 2015 study by Friederike Tegge, titled Investigating Song-Based Language Teaching and Its Effect on Lexical Learning, tackles this question head-on. And the findings are more nuanced, and more useful, than the usual “music is magic” narrative.

Why Songs Get Used in Language Classrooms

Teachers have reached for songs as a teaching tool for a long time, and for good reasons. Songs expose learners to natural rhythm, stress, and pronunciation. They introduce vocabulary in context. They’re repetitive in a way that doesn’t feel like drilling. And crucially, students tend to enjoy them, which matters more than skeptics often admit. Motivation is half the battle in language learning.

But enjoyment alone doesn’t prove learning. That’s the gap Tegge’s research set out to investigate: when students learn vocabulary through songs, do they actually retain more words than they would through spoken text?

What the Study Looked At

Tegge’s work focused on lexical learning, the acquisition of vocabulary, which is one of the most measurable outcomes in language education. The study compared how learners picked up new words when those words were presented through songs versus through equivalent spoken or written material. This matters because it isolates the musical variable. If songs work, we should see a measurable difference. If they don’t, we should see that too.

The research sits within a broader field sometimes called the “song-stuck-in-my-head phenomenon” or, more formally, involuntary musical imagery. The hypothesis is that the melodic and rhythmic structure of songs creates extra memory hooks that plain text can’t replicate.

The Takeaway for Learners and Teachers

Tegge’s findings support what a lot of good language teachers already suspected: songs can be genuinely useful for vocabulary learning, but they’re not a shortcut. They work best when the song is chosen carefully for the learner’s level, when the vocabulary is actually within reach, and when the song is paired with some kind of active engagement, not just passive listening.

In other words, putting on a playlist in the target language while you do the dishes is pleasant, but it’s not going to turn you into a fluent speaker. Studying the lyrics, singing along, looking up unfamiliar words, and revisiting the song over several days is a different story. That’s where the memory advantages of music start to pay off.

Practical Ways to Use Songs for Language Learning

If you want to put this research to work, here’s what tends to help. Pick songs at or slightly above your current level, the same “comprehensible input plus a bit” principle that applies to reading. Work with the lyrics written down, at least at first, because hearing sung language is harder than hearing spoken language. Translate the tricky parts, but don’t obsess over every word. And come back to the same song a few times across a week or two. Spaced repetition works with music just like it works with flashcards.

Genre matters less than you might think. What matters is that you actually like the song enough to listen to it willingly. A song you enjoy and return to beats a “better” song you never replay.

The Bigger Picture

Tegge’s 2015 study is part of a growing body of research suggesting that the intuition behind using music in language classrooms has real merit, but that the effect depends on how songs are used. Music isn’t a magic bullet, and passive exposure has limits. But integrated thoughtfully into a learning routine, songs offer something that textbook exercises struggle to match: vocabulary that sticks because it’s attached to something you actually want to remember.

For learners, that’s a reassuring finding. The thing that makes language learning bearable, and sometimes even joyful, might also be the thing making it work.

Reference: Tegge, F. (2015). Investigating Song-Based Language Teaching and Its Effect on Lexical Learning. Linguistics and Education.