Learning
Literacy through Music
Literacy
is one of the core subjects taught in United States schools. In today’s
society, one would have a difficult time functioning without developed literacy
skills, so emphasis is placed on it in the classroom. Music, on the other
hand, is seen as an extracurricular activity or a place where students can go
to have fun or possibly give their regular teachers a break for a while.
However, music has much value and can teach students many skills necessary for
well-rounded development. Value can be found in music for music’s sake,
but it can also enhance other subject areas. Teachers can use music to
deepen the learning environment in a literacy classroom. Many
commonalities exist between music and literacy, especially in the pre-K to
second grade years, and therefore music education is a vital element in
children’s literary development.
Literacy,
or the state of being literate, is more than simply being able to read and
write. James Paul Gee (1989), Professor of Literary Studies at Arizona
State University, defines literacy as “control of secondary use of language”
(n.p.). By secondary usage, he means that a literate person has the
ability to communicate within a given social context outside of the home
environment, which would be a primary use of language. This definition of
literacy diverges from the traditional view of what literacy is. In
schools, a special time is usually set aside to teach about reading and writing
activities which focus on reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation, and
other similar skills. However, these skills transcend into every other area
of the student’s learning, and literacy should not be seen as a separate
entity. Gee’s definition connects literacy directly with communication,
meaning it is not just concerned with words on paper but with verbal exchanges
as well. Literacy programs should embrace the development of all of these
skills as a holistic goal and not only focus on reading and writing, although
those are still important.
One
area that a literacy program should emphasize is the development of auditory
processes, and these are also stressed in a music program. Dee Hansen,
Elaine Bernstorf, and Gayle M. Stuber (2004) list many auditory elements of
literacy including phoneme awareness, discrimination between similar auditory
elements, speech signals, auditory memory, and more. With phoneme
awareness, children will learn how sounds come together to form words, enabling
them to make sense of the sounds that they hear. In music, this would
translate to an awareness of pitches and how they form a musical line.
Discriminating between similar auditory elements is essential for effective
communication because it will mean that students are able to pick out
individual words that sound alike or use context to define homophones during a
normal conversation. Similarly, students in a music classroom will learn
to discriminate between individual pitches and sing or play in a certain key,
all of which have their own set of pitches. Knowledge of speech signals,
like vocal inflection, volume, and stress, is also important to gain meaning
from verbal communication. Auditory signals are also significant in
music. Children learn to distinguish between their singing and speaking
voices, sing in high and low registers, and make music loudly and softly by
listening to teacher and peer examples. When students are able to put all
of these elements on a regular basis, they have gained auditory memory, both in
literacy and music. In fact, music may be able to take this memory skill
a bit farther than a typical literacy class; students are often asked to memorize
many songs for a concert but are rarely asked to explicitly memorize a lengthy
text that is not set to music, at least in younger grades. These auditory
skills are an integral part of students’ literary development, and they are all
reinforced or enhanced within a music class.
Visual
decoding processes are also a large part of literacy learning. Some of
the visual elements that are part of both literacy and music are the knowledge
of letters, words, and sentences, visual focus, and visual memory (Hansen et
al., 2004). The knowledge of letters, words, and sentences helps students
frame their reading and writing skills. They will understand the
functions of all the letters and how to put them together to make meaningful
words, and in turn, they will group the words to form sentences. For
music, notes are the words. Students learn how to read notes, both in
duration and pitch level, and they will see how these come together to make
measures and phrases of music. Focus consists of a few components of visual
literacy. First is a student’s ability to pay attention to visual
information without distraction. Another example of visual focus is being
able to follow one line of text on a page from left to right. This type
of eye coordination is the same in Western music. When reading a piece of
music with just the vocal line, children will need to follow it from left to
right and then down to the next staff. This gets even more complicated in
music with multiple parts, such as a piano score with both left and right hand
or a choral piece with four different voices occurring at the same time.
Visual memory is the counterpart of auditory memory: the use of all the visual
elements in a naturally remembered way. This comes out reading both texts
and musical lines smoothly. All of these visual decoding skills are
emphasized within both literacy and music classrooms.
Teachers
also help beginning literacy students in other areas of language
knowledge. Wiggins (2007) gives some literacy standards for four year old
learners which include expanding vocabulary and knowledge of rhymes.
Vocabulary growth occurs whenever students are exposed to new material, like a
story or a song. Putting new information into a musical context can also
help student memory; for example, the song “Fifty Nifty United States” will
greatly solidify knowledge of state names and possibly stick with students
throughout their lifetimes. In literature, the most common source of
rhyme is poetry. Vocal music is essentially poetry set to a melody, and
songs written for children almost always rhyme, so music class is a good place
to practice familiarization with rhymes. Poetry also connects to music
because of its rhythm. Whereas finding fluency in speaking poetry takes
practice, music has the rhythm built into it. The score tells students
which notes and syllables to stress and which to make longer or shorter.
Performing a text in this manner can help students figure out how to do this
for non-musical texts without teacher instruction. Both vocabulary and
rhymes have a place within literacy and music, and these skills help students
become effective language users.
|
Literacy Skill
|
Musical Skill
|
Example Song
|
|
Phoneme awareness
|
Pitch awareness
|
Apples and Bananas
|
|
Discrimination of auditory elements
|
Discrimination of pitches and key awareness
|
Hickory Dickory Dock
|
|
Speech signals
|
Auditory signals
|
Pop Goes the Weasel
|
|
Letters, words, and sentences
|
Notes
|
Bingo
|
|
Visual focus
|
Visual focus
|
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
|
|
Rhyme
|
Rhyme
|
Down by the Bay
|
|
Rhythm
|
Rhythm
|
Shoo Fly
|
Returning
to Gee’s definition, it is important to view literacy as a social act.
This aligns with Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory, which states social
interaction is vital for developing children’s understanding (Culatta
2012). Another of the literacy standards for four year olds is being able
to talk in front of a group (Wiggins 2007). For many children, this is a
scary experience. In a music classroom, similar occurrences exist when
singing or playing instruments in front of peers, teachers, and even parents
during concerts. Through music, students will be able to practice being
secure in front of a group. Some children may find confidence in their
singing voices where it lacks in their speaking voices, or vice versa.
Those who are not confident in either area will simply get more exposure and
reinforcement through both literacy and musical experiences. Other social
skills are developed in music classrooms that may not be emphasized within the
regular classroom. Music naturally creates a social environment, where
students are working together to produce a common result. They become
comfortable interacting with peers in new ways and learning from one another by
listening. In elementary school, solo time is rare, so most of the focus
is on group work. When students do receive solos at a younger age, they
learn to present themselves in front of peers and an audience.
These
musical aspects of learning do not have to occur exclusively in the music
classroom, and many sources exist to help classroom teachers who may not be
confident in their musical skills. Katherine Kimball and Lisa O’Connor
(2010) state that integrating music into regular instruction can greatly assist
auditory learners, who are usually limited to activities like the alphabet song
or having background music to improve the general learning environment.
They give many creative models that teachers can use to enhance auditory
learners’ classroom experience. For example, when older students are
learning the difference between primary and secondary sources, teachers can use
recordings of the original instrumentation versus modern instrumentation of a
Baroque symphony. Auditory learners will hear the difference in sounds
and be able to discuss how the modern instruments changed what the composer
originally wrote. Many similar exercises can be used when comparing two
literacy concepts. For younger students, McEwing (2011) outlines ways
teachers can use music through songs from their own childhood and big book
sing-alongs. Starting with the familiar is always best, and teachers can
gain confidence in their own skills if they use songs, chants, and dances that
they have known since their school days. This is a good way to introduce music
into a regular classroom and sets a baseline for other musical
activities. For example, a teacher may incorporate songs during big book
instruction. Students can sing the repeated text every time it comes into
the story. From a literary standpoint, students can analyze the
characters as the story progresses, and as they get more skilled at this, they
can even explore how the characters relate to the music. Teachers should
try to involve music in their classrooms in any way that they can because it
greatly enhances learning, especially for those who are auditory learners.
Many
of the skills involved in literacy can also be found in music, and music
education helps students’ literacy development. Literacy is larger than
just reading and writing, and it also includes listening, speaking, and social
skills that are relevant to communication. Within the classroom
environment, teachers seek to heighten students’ auditory and visual decoding
processes. These literacy elements are also found in music and can be
reinforced through music education. Other elements of rhyme and
vocabulary development also exist both in literacy and music, and students can
have enriching experiences in these areas within a music classroom.
Because literacy is a social skill, this aspect of music is also key to a
student’s literacy learning. Musical-literary experiences can occur
within and outside of a music classroom, and teachers can find many ways to
incorporate music into their regular schedules. Music has a value of its
own right and is not just a tool for literacy education, but it can be used to
greatly enrich these literacy learning experiences for all students.
References
Culatta,
R. (2012). Social development theory (L. Vygotsky). In Instructional Design.
Retrieved September 1, 2012.
Gee,
J.P. (1989). What is literacy?. Journal of Education, 171(1), 18-25.
Hansen,
D., Bernstorf, E., & Stuber, G.M. (2004). The music and literacy
connection. Reston, Virginia: MENC: The National Association for
Music Education.
Kimball,
K., & O’Connor, L. (2010). Engaging auditory modalities through the use of
music in information literacy instruction. Reference & User Services
Quarterly, 49(4), 316-319.
McEwing,
H.E. (2011). Music, movement, and early literacy: A best practices primer for
“Gotta move!”. Children & Libraries: The Journal Of The Association For
Library Service To Children, 9(2), 29-35.
Wiggins,
D.G. (2007). Pre-k music and the emergent reader: promoting literacy in a
music-enhanced environment. Early Childhood Education Journal,
35(1), 55-64.
*All
songs can be found on The world’s greatest childrens nursery rhymes &
songs. Undercover Digital. (2010).
