ABSTRACT (Preliminary for Proposal 387 words)
This qualitative exploratory study investigates how adult beginner learners perceive, experience, and interpret a Purpose Designed Musical Intervention (PDMI) for the initial learning of Spanish as a foreign language. Grounded in both foundational frameworks and recent interdisciplinary research literature published between 2018 and 2025, the study responds to current debates on music, language, adult learning, music therapy, cognitive neuroscience, and language pedagogy. Although music is widely used in language education, it is often introduced through commercial songs, popular repertoire, or background listening that is not composed in structural correspondence with the linguistic content to be learned. This creates a pedagogical and methodological gap concerning musical materials intentionally designed to align rhythm, melody, harmony, repetition, prosody, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and semantic progression. The objectives of the study are to describe learners’ perceptions of the PDMI in relation to vocabulary recall, pronunciation accessibility, and grammatical clarity; to examine how learners experience the alignment between musical and linguistic structures; and to explore perceptions of engagement, motivation, confidence, and enjoyment when learning Spanish through a PDMI. The study is situated at the intersection of applied linguistics, music therapy, cognitive neuroscience, and educational research, while remaining firmly framed as a qualitative educational inquiry rather than a clinical or experimental intervention. Participants will be adult learners aged 18 or above who are non-native speakers of Spanish and have no functional prior knowledge of the language. They will engage with an asynchronous online audiovisual activity based on an original pedagogical song, El niño feliz, supported by lyrics, translation, visual material, grammar frames, repetition, short interaction prompts, and open reflective questions. Data will be generated through completion tasks, written reflections, a post-activity reflective questionnaire, and optional semi-structured interviews. These data will be analysed thematically in order to identify how participants describe the linguistic, musical, cognitive, affective, and pedagogical dimensions of the experience. The study is expected to generate qualitative findings concerning perceived linguistic support, musical-linguistic coherence, learner comfort, confidence, motivation, and the accessibility of structured musical scaffolding in beginner Spanish learning. It does not aim to measure causal effectiveness, linguistic achievement, neurocognitive change, or superiority over conventional instruction. The study concludes by positioning PDMIs as potentially meaningful mediational resources for adult foreign language education, offering a structured, affectively supportive, and linguistically aligned alternative to the incidental use of songs or background music in language learning.
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