Music and Reading Integration: Effects on Children's Comprehension

Introduction

Integration of music and reading may help parents prepare their children for school. On the surface, music and literacy seem opposite of each other both in meaning and delivery. However, the two forms of learning go hand in hand. For example, lyrics and literacy are similar because lyrics are the words sung in a song. Often, they are poetic and can be understood as poetry that sometimes tells a story.

Many singer-songwriters are also storytellers, weaving intricate and powerful stories into their songs. If one examines a music soundtrack alongside a story's plot, one can see how music is used to help tell the story as much as the narrative itself. As technology advances, music is becoming readily interweaved with reading comprehension. One study examined the use of multimodal e-books that combined text with animation, images, and sounds. Children made academic gains in reading from using multimodal e-books (Morgan, 2013).

Music does not have to be the only way children can learn reading comprehension. Sound serves as the basis for music and can help children improve their reading comprehension through audio-assisted reading. "…the audio-assisted reading group's improvement in reading rates and comprehension levels was substantially higher than for the silent reading group" (Chang & Millett, 2015, p. 91). By using sound along with reading, it may help children understand the linguistic aspects of reading and therefore improve memory and reading comprehension. Moreover, it may help children improve their listening comprehension, a potentially untapped area that researchers have yet to examine in depth.

Listening comprehension is "among the least understood and least researched of language skills. For many years, listening has been neglected as part of language arts curricula" (Podhajski, 2016, p. 43). Having been disregarded compared to reading, writing, and speaking, listening has seen a resurgence of interest in recent years. Instructors wishing to provide listening comprehension curriculum to students have turned to frameworks that incorporate understanding of pitch, volume, and tone — which means inclusion of music in order to provide improved listening comprehension. Listening comprehension may be a key reason why music and reading can work hand in hand to promote reading comprehension in students.

Because language is such a complex and multifaceted area of learning, music can help deliver a better means of educating a young child. "Language includes phonology, the sound system; morphology, meaningful word parts; semantics, word meanings and relationships; grammar and syntax, the rules governing our use of spoken and written language; discourse, connected language as in stories or conversation; and pragmatics" (Podhajski, 2016, p. 43). Human language relies on constituent structure as its central feature. "Analogous to how syntax organizes words in sentences, a narrative grammar organizes sequential images into hierarchic constituents" (Cohn, Jackendoff, Holcomb, & Kuperberg, 2014, p. 63). By providing children with a framework that allows learning from a multifaceted perspective, it has the potential to promote effective learning practices that can then be taken into school.

This paper aims to understand the effects of integrating music and reading and to help answer the following question: Does integration of music and reading before entering school make a difference in a child's ability to read compared to children who do not receive a combination of integrative music and reading from their parents before entering school? By analyzing previous similar experiments and conducting an experiment, this paper aims to provide evidence supporting or refuting the notion that integration of music and reading can improve a child's reading comprehension.

The experiment will include six children aged 5–7. They will have access to various tools and programs that incorporate music and reading and will be monitored for a period of two weeks. Their progress will be assessed one month after school commences. One group will receive integrative curriculum while the other will receive non-integrative, traditional curriculum. Results will be assessed both before entering school and one month after entering school.

The literature review will cover various similar studies and will act as a guide for the formation of the experiment. Several hypotheses will be formulated to provide a framework from which to continue with the experiment. The hypothetical results will allow for a simulated outcome that will help future experiments understand how to proceed.

Literature Review

This literature review aims to understand how music and reading integration may help a child improve his or her reading comprehension level. The eight studies are from recent years and incorporate various methods of learning, from online reading strategies to the utilization of internet resources and e-readers. Each study is experimental in nature and offers an understanding of reading comprehension from a varied perspective. Music and reading are examined not just from one angle, but from several, including the use of sound and speech.

The internet provides a wealth of resources that instructors or parents can use to teach children to read. One 2013 study aimed to design and develop a "web-based reading strategy training program and investigated students' use of its features and EFL teachers' and students' perceptions of the program" (Huang, 2013, p. 340). The program provided students with "four types of reading strategy functions (Global, Problem-solving, Support, and Socio-affective) through 15 strategy buttons: Keyword, Preview, Prediction, Outline, Summary, Semantic Mapping, Pronunciation, Speed Reading, Dictionary, Translation, Grammar, Highlight, Notebook, Music Box, and My Questions" (Huang, 2013, p. 340). This kind of program allowed children to read not just from a traditional perspective but from a modern one, incorporating sounds and speech into the reading strategy functions. The study's results indicated that students felt more engaged with the learning material and reported higher motivation to learn, thus demonstrating that students benefit from a varied learning environment.

Another study focused on advancements in technology and the inclusion of electronic reading systems (Wright, Fugett, & Caputa, 2013). Digital text has led to the creation of reading material that incorporates sounds, music, and speech. The researchers compared reading comprehension scores and vocabulary comprehension from paper-based book reading to electronic storybook reading. They used an AB experimental design with three female participants aged 7–8 years, enrolled in second grade.

The results pointed toward no significant improvement from either digital text or paper-based text reading. However, the researchers noted higher levels of engagement and motivation with the digital text option, attributable to the convenience and accessibility of the materials and the option to explore online resources connected to the digital books. This study suggests a need to incorporate more online resources and reading tools to promote higher levels of motivation and engagement.

Musical training and music education have been linked to phonological awareness and have been studied as a learning aid for children who have trouble reading. A 2013 study noted the small quantity of studies providing support for the idea that music training can improve reading in children, but sought to answer whether musical training can help children who have not yet begun formal reading instruction. The researchers explored two dimensions: links among kindergarten-aged children's phonological awareness and music rhythm skills, and whether children who received intensive musical training showed greater improvement than those who did not.

The results suggested "rhythm skill was related to phonological segmentation skill at the beginning of kindergarten, and that children who received more music training during kindergarten showed improvement in a wider range of phonological awareness skills at the end of kindergarten" (Moritz, Yampolsky, Papadelis, Thomson, & Wolf, 2012, p. 739). These results support the idea that music and reading can be used together to improve reading comprehension through specific aspects of reading such as phonological awareness, helping to bridge the gap between music and reading integration.

Music education can also help students with disabilities learn to read. One study examined how musical training might remediate timing problems, increase spatial awareness, or augment pitch perception in children with dyslexia, potentially leading to improvements in fluency and literacy (Cogo-Moreira, Andriolo, Yazigi, Brandao de Avila, & Mari, 2012). Although the researchers searched for evidence from randomized controlled trials, they could not find any evidence supporting a positive impact of musical training on the reading ability of students with dyslexia. The article highlights a gap in the research, indicating there is insufficient information to determine connections between musical training and literacy improvement in children with learning disabilities.

One study examined the benefits of musical training on language skills through a discussion of five subskills that underlie reading acquisition: "phonological awareness, speech-in-noise perception, rhythm perception, auditory working memory, and the ability to learn sound patterns — and show that each is linked to music experience" (Tierney & Kraus, 2013, p. 209). The researchers examined longitudinal studies to determine whether musical training can improve those areas and thus improve reading. Their findings suggest that musical training can offer effective educational strategies for all children in language development and reading, including those with language learning impairments, thereby offering partial support for the inconclusive findings on musical training and dyslexia.

Speech is a component of music, just as sound is. Reading often incorporates speech through reading aloud or listening to others read aloud. One study examined, through quantitative correlational research, how linguistic technology-based integrative teaching strategies worked to improve reading competence in college-aged students (Madkour, 2016). The different phases tested six skills, some of which were identifying central ideas, comparing and contrasting, and identifying cause-and-effect relationships. Students who used the linguistic-integrative model showed significant improvements throughout testing compared to those who did not, strongly supporting the use of models that incorporate sounds, speech, and technology into reading practices.

While one study was inconclusive regarding musical training and improvement of skills in students with dyslexia, another provided marked improvement in phonological development. Phonological development is associated with speech and language development. In that study, musical training helped students with dyslexia improve their sound rise time, and the researchers identified musical beat structure as a major longitudinal predictor of "development in reading, accounting for over half of the variance in reading comprehension along with a linguistic measure of phonological awareness" (Goswami, Huss, Mead, Fosker, & Verney, 2013, p. 1363). This provides direct evidence that musical training can help improve reading comprehension.

Speech can also be an important aspect of music and reading integration. A 2011 study experimented with speech and music within interrupted reading and found that background speech and music had a positive effect on reading — specifically, background speech slowed reading rates and promoted long-term working memory (Cauchard, Cane, & Weger, 2011). This occurred because students needed to re-read words and pay more careful attention to what they read. Studies such as these help explain the mechanisms behind reading and why such methods improve reading comprehension.

This literature review covered musical training and its impact on reading comprehension by exploring speech, music, and the mechanisms behind their ability to improve reading comprehension in children. The information gleaned from the literature review will help establish the framework for the hypotheses in the next section.

Hypotheses

The hypothesis centers on whether music and reading integration can improve reading comprehension in children before they attend school. The literature review pointed to music and reading integration improving reading comprehension for children before entering school, for children already in school, and for children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. However, the hypothesis was refined to focus on a more specific question: what aspects of music enable potential reading comprehension improvement when integrated with reading? This is where the experiment aims to explore new avenues.

Specifically, can music and reading integration lead to increased phonological awareness and development that will then lead to improved reading comprehension? A 2016 study examining the left hemisphere of young readers found a link between phonological awareness and temporal processing (Ugolini et al., 2016). "Phonological awareness, the ability to manipulate the sounds of language, is key for learning to read. The first step towards phonological competence is identification of syllables and rimes" (Ugolini et al., 2016, p. 17). For young readers to see improvement in their reading, music-integrative methods should focus on cultivating phonological awareness.

Children with higher levels of phonological awareness may also be able to improve their listening comprehension, as well as their reading comprehension. As Ugolini et al. (2016) noted, rise times or amplitude rise times (ART) influence a child's degree of phonological awareness. Experiments should therefore target rise times and other aspects of phonological awareness to better understand their potentially positive impact on reading comprehension. As another study emphasized, understanding this impact is imperative, as many researchers have come to recognize phonological awareness as an essential precondition for early literacy development (Kempert et al., 2016).