Halifax choir brings newcomers together to learn English, one note at a time

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In a large room at St. Andrew’s United Church in downtown Halifax, a piano player pounds out the chorus to a Talking Heads song as a group of 30 people sing along.

“I’m feelin’ okay this mornin’/And you know/We’re on a road to paradise/Here we go, here we go.”

Though the bottom half of their faces are sheathed in masks, choir director Rachel Manko Lutz can detect there are mumblers in the group: those whose volume drops, who switch from projecting loudly to murmuring when they come across words or notes they’re unsure of.

On a whiteboard at the front of the room, she writes, “strong and wrong.”

“If I’m going to sing the wrong note, I’m going to sing it confidently,” she tells them. This is a lesson for choir singers, but also for English language learners – and almost everyone here is one.

The Halifax Newcomer Choir, which Ms. Manko Lutz started in November, 2021, has swelled from just a handful of Tuesday-night drop-in singers to a few dozen. This reflects a recent surge in immigration as the province aggressively courts newcomers – in 2022, it attracted 12,650 permanent residents, an increase of 38 per cent from the previous year and an all-time high.

Ms. Manko Lutz was inspired to start the choir after teaching English to immigrants in Halifax for years, and hearing from them that there were few opportunities to practice the language outside of class. They also struggled with a sense of isolation – meeting people was difficult.

On this day, a group of 30 has convened for the two-hour meetup. Almost all of them have arrived in Canada within the past three years. Their level of English proficiency varies, from some who struggle to share much more than their name and country of origin, to those who are confident making conversation.

Somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum is Pedram Gholipour, who has only been in Canada for five days. He came here on a work permit, accompanying his partner who is an international student. They will most likely try to build a life here together. Someone in his apartment building mentioned the choir to him as a good place to meet other newcomers.

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In Hamadan, Iran, Mr. Gholipour taught elementary-aged children to play timpani, flute and bells, but has resigned himself to more realistic career goals in his new home: “Canada for me hard,” he said, in an attempt to explain why he can’t imagine himself having the same career here. “Maybe I’ll work in a restaurant.” For now, the choir will help him maintain some music in his life.

Halfway through the practice, Mr. Gholipour struggles to name any of the songs the group has sung so far but quickly picks up on the melodies and self-assuredly sings along with everything, including the famous Newfoundland folk song I’s the B’y.

Ms. Manko Lutz has noticed singers who say their English is inadequate improve over the months they attend choir meetups. She’s created an environment where stumbles are never laughed at, but they are corrected.

“I hear a lot from newcomers that once they get to a certain level of English, people stop correcting because they’re understandable enough. We will always correct. We’ll always keep striving for better fluency, for more competence.”

Ms. Manko Lutz speaks with the crisp enunciation of an experienced ESL teacher: there’s no dropping off of syllables at the ends of sentences or softening of consonants. She says, “lit-tle” with emphasis on both Ts.

At a table set up in the space, five children are glued to tablets, playing games or doing homework. Some of the singers bring their elderly parents with them. There’s no pre-registration, no restrictions tied to immigration status. Ms. Manko Lutz said she wanted the choir to be as barrier-free as possible.

The group, is “not as much focused on high-quality musical sound” but rather on “building relationships, and feeling safe in the space.”

During one of the breaks in the two-hour weekly session, Ms. Manko Lutz asks them to pair off and talk, learn a few things about each other.

Akaya Shingu, an international student from Japan, who has been chatting with the gregarious Wonjae Jeon, tells the group, “He is very –” she pauses, doing the mental gymnastics of translation, “energetic. I have to be like that!”

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Mr. Jeon, who had been an engineer with a railway company in South Korea, arrived in Canada with his wife and three children in August, 2022. He wasn’t always this outgoing. He was nervous about speaking the first few times he attended, then grew more confident. “Now there is no stress,” he says.

He attends weekly English classes at the public library, a setting much different than choir.

“Singing in English is more easier than talking,” he says with a laugh.

Research suggests music can be a powerful tool in language learning. A 2016 Taiwanese study that incorporated music videos into English instruction found that students became much more familiar with the rules of pronunciation after memorizing lyrics and singing along with the videos. A 2022 meta-analysis of studies into music and English language learning conducted by South Korean researchers concluded that students who received course instruction through English songs learned more complex vocabulary faster than those who didn’t, and pop songs were a particularly effective tool for this type of instruction.

Ms. Manko Lutz has seen that phenomenon with her own eyes.

After the group sings the country music tune Crowded Table by The Highwomen, Ms. Manko Lutz asks if there are any new words they’ve encountered in the lyrics. “Sow,” someone mentions. Another calls out “reap,” and “crop.” One more mentions “crowded.” In each case, someone else has a correct guess about the definition.

To Ms. Manko Lutz’s amusement, many now know what “barnacles” are after singing the Donna Rhodenizer song Call of the Ocean.

“They have words now that they’ve learned from the songs that they can pull out with great fluency because they’ve sung them so often, whereas if you taught them in spoken English, they might not be able to retain those same vocabulary words,” she says.

The first go-through of a song, the singers are often nervously studying the lyrics. On the second run, eyes lift, shoulders bob. Feet, once hesitant, start tapping. Fingers jab the air to punctuate notes.

Ms. Manko Lutz recognizes this change. The group has sung Road to Nowhere twice this evening. She starts dancing, strutting around the room and right up to singers, encouraging them to dance with her. Before the final verse, she presents a challenge: “You know the words, you can look at me!”