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Andrew Williams

Dr. Jan Rieman

English-1103

9 November 2010

Self-Assessment: I feel that this has come out to be a fairly solid paper. I manage to

convey all of my thoughts while using the research I’ve gathered. I paid careful attention to my

Works Cited and my in-text citations, so I feel that’s not a worry. My conclusion could have

probably been stronger, but it does its job of summing up the main ideas and the single main

point of the entire paper. Otherwise I feel the ideas flowed well and it proves convincing for

skeptics.

Music Will Make a Poet Out of You

Literacy is easily one of the most important skills any individual can possess. This has

always been and always will be true. But how does one improve their literacy skills, or begin

with what is commonly called a “jump start”? Music skills and music education have proven

themselves time and time again as invaluable contributors to advanced literacy skills. Musical

ability, musical training, or both lead to advanced literacy, which becomes evident either in early

ages or slowly over time.

Many who have studied this particular subject believe that this advancement stems from

learning music at an early age, and by extension the advancement becomes evident early on as

well. However, as said by Dr. Joseph Piro, Assistant Professor at Long Island University’s
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Department of Curriculum and Instruction, such a correlation is incredibly difficult to prove

beyond a doubt (32). At the same time, convincing evidence that music training has an impact

on mathematical skills has led to the increase in evidence which points to music indeed having

quite an impact on reading and writing skills (32). In order to try to prove this, Dr. Piro and

other professors working in his department gathered 103 students from a large American public

school system who already were involved in regular music lessons along with a second group of

students who had little or no musical experience, and gave each group similar literacy tests in

order to compare literacy performance. The two groups were otherwise very similar, coming

from similar socio-economic backgrounds and showing demographic consistency. It would

become an entirely unbiased study aside from the musical involvement (Piro 32).

The 103 students from the urban school system who serve as the above experiment’s

experimental group were part of a curriculum where from kindergarten through second grade

music instruction was mandatory. Developed by the Music and The Brain (MATB) project, the

curriculum taught music through “group keyboard instruction” (Piro 32). In other words, the

students attended 45-minute lessons twice a week in a keyboard laboratory, which provided each

of them with headphones and a personal keyboard which they used to read, interpret, and finally

practice music. These lessons taught the students all the basic essentials of notation, hand and

fingering techniques, sight-reading, note values, and rest values, along with various other skills,

among which were pitch recognition and pattern recognition (32).

Dr. Piro’s study began when the students in the experimental group (103 students who

have had music lessons) and those in the control group (students who had not had music lessons)

began second grade. By this time, the experimental group had already had two years of music

training. However, oddly enough (and to the dismay of Dr. Piro and his colleagues) when both
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groups took the pretest at the beginning of the school year, the experimental group’s

performance nearly matched the control group’s performance when the former was expected to

greatly surpass the latter. For this they initially blamed the ten-week summer vacation, but

began to toy with the possibility of two years of music training potentially not being long enough

for the students to be able to retain what they learned or the growth that came from it (Piro 33).

It is heavily suggested that it takes a fair amount of time-potentially several years-for the effects

of prolonged music study to become evident (Hallam 31).Nevertheless, they remained involved

in music training for the rest of that school year, and at the end of the year both the experimental

group and the control group took the test once again. This time the expected results came to

pass: the experimental group highly outperformed the control group (33). Despite this, however,

not everyone following this debate is particularly satisfied.

Dr. Susan Hallam, Professor of the Psychology of Education as well as professional

musician, seems to argue that while the data may appear promising, it’s not quite as reliable as

it’s said to be. Despite results from experiments that all but prove beyond a doubt a connection

between music study and advanced literacy skills, she points out that several studies have not

found any difference in reading ability between students in the experimental group and students

in the control group (31). However, there are many other factors to account for. Summer

vacations always do quite a number on young children in school, learning on the piano may have

had an impact, and, in the case of Dr. Piro’s experiment, it’s very possible that many students

simply may not show much change over the long term if the long term happens to not be a very

long time (33). Nevertheless, Dr. Hallam maintains that there are “benefits for engaging in

musical activities in relation to reading beyond those associated with language development, but

our understanding of these processes is currently limited” (31).

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Some argue that there is a direct correlation between musical development and literacy

development, mainly because “human beings are inherently musical” (O’Connor and Kimball

317). In fact, studies show that one of the first intelligences if not the first intelligence is that of

rhythm. This fact is due in part to the presence of the maternal heartbeat during development as

well as other external sounds (318). This supposedly embedded sense of rhythm is one of many

things that make music training so effective in the advancement of literacy.

The facts previously stated may very well explain why music stimulation has such a

profound impact on students (young students, especially) with learning disabilities. For

example, a beat/rhythm/melody which holds a student’s attention while directing it to some sort

of task required of the student would be quite ideal. Of course it doesn’t always work that way,

which calls for more experimentation. By observing the language development and emotional

adjustment of students with special needs after placing them into music study, it was reported

that the use of music in their studies increased verbal response and improved language of

“language-delayed children” (McIntire 1). In this way, music is directly linked to language.

Who can really say just how much of an impact music training has on literacy? How do

we know that musical ability and advanced literacy skills aren’t simply things we’re born with

that go hand-in-hand? As of now there is no way of knowing, but evidence seems to consistently

point to the likelihood of music having quite a large impact on literacy, and until now has all but

been proven beyond a doubt, such as the above experiment using the two groups of children. Or

perhaps the sudden advance in lingual ability was coincidental, rather than being a result of prior

music study. Just as O’Connor and Kimball state, “students’ familiarity with music provides an

excellent means of setting up problem-based learning” (319). This suggests that music studies
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will lead to increased proficiency in other areas (literacy specifically), no matter how different.

Proficiency in music equates to advanced literacy skills; there is too much evidence to deny it.

Works Cited

McIntire, Jean M. “Developing Literacy Through Music.” Teaching Music Jun. 2009: 1.

Academic Search Premier. J. Murray Adkins Library. 6 Oct. 2010 <A

href="http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=aph&AN=26026921&site=ehost-live">Developing Literacy through

Music.</A>.

Hallam, Susan. “The Effect of Music Lessons on Literacy.” Literacy Today Sep. 2009: 2.

Academic Search Premier. J. Murray Adkins Library. 6 Oct. 2010 <A

href="http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=aph&AN=44860452&site=ehost-live">The effect of music lessons on

literacy.</A>.

Piro, Joseph. “Music Training and Literacy Development.” Literacy Today Jun. 2009: 4.

Academic Search Premier. J. Murray Adkins Library. 6 Oct. 2010 <A

href="http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=aph&AN=44139231&site=ehost-live">Music training and literacy

development.</A>.
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Kimball, Katherine, and O’Connor, Lisa. “Engaging Auditory Modalities through the Use of

Music in Information Literacy Instruction.” Information Literacy and Instruction: 4.

Academic Search Premier. J. Murray Adkins Library. 2 Nov. 2010