A COMBINED EXPERIMENTAL AND DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF MUSIC ON READING AND LANGUAGE

A combined experimental and descriptive study was carried out to explore the effect of music on the reading/language arts performance of first graders. Children were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Orff-Schulwerk music, visual arts or control. Following premeasures, the music and art groups met three times weekly for thirty minutes from December to May. Pre and post measures included psychometric and edumetric tests: the Metropolitan Reading Readiness, the California Test of Basic Skills and the Botel Milestones criterion referenced reading test. Related areas of measurement were metalinguistic awareness, auditory-visual integration, following directions and concept development by the Goodenough-Harris Draw-a-Person test. Quantitative findings were treated by comparison plotting and analysis of variance, including mean differences, correlation and regression analysis with confidence level determination. Qualitative procedures and assessments included documentation with field notes, observations, taped teacher: child interviews, monthly work samples, individual background data and assessments for following directions. Qualitative results were treated by retrospective analysis of field notes, interviews, observations and artifacts. These analyses revealed that the music group began at a statistically significantly lower level that the other two, though undiscriminated by the Metropolitan Reading Readiness test. By the end of the program, they had imporved to the level of the other groups in reading and related areas. Individual analysis of initially poor performers in all three groups showed that this improvement was not simply a growth spurt, but rather the effect of the music treatment. The regression analysis revealed the strong impact of music treatment on concept development and reading perfomance, the latter not at a high confidence level. It also revealed a strong, adverse effect of non-English home language on reading, overcome only in the music group. The small number of such children here advises treating this result with caution. Auditory-visual integration assessment compared success in three game-like tasks for sound reproduction, manipulation, and visual coding with reading stage and metalinguistic awareness, for the music group only. Prereaders were less successful in all three tasks. Levels of success and strategies were directly related to stage in metalinguistic awareness. Visual coding representation demonstrated increasing levels of abstraction from random to number to pattern. Metalinguistic awareness results showed the greatest growth for the music group, demonstrated in phonics activity, oral reading and spelling samples, and language expression. Retrospective analysis described the effect of music as increasing attentional skills, manipulation-sound/strategy development, development of coordination of modalities, growth in self-concept and cooperation. A model for the relationship of music to reading is proposed. Combining research in the areas of music, psycholinguistics, auditory-visual integration and Piagetian theory suggests that the child\u27s purposeful cognitive structuring of the material increases success in reading tasks. It is proposed that music accomplishes this by systematically teaching abstract sound manipulation and sound-to-visual code mapping, by providing structure and organization independent of a phoneme-based system, where the musical note acts as a syllable. Music provides this intersection of coordinating schemata, where the child learns strategies to manipulate and segment the sound and its visual representation. Final conclusions are that music shows a demonstrated potential for enhancing reading and language development in the first grade. The combined methodologies--quantitative and qualitative--are essential to revealing the phenomena