A Sound Foundation - Literacy through Music Research Project

Indicators of Literacy Proficiency

In order to become literate children require a host of skills, literacy experiences and knowledge of print and printed matter. It is important that these skills are developed in the early years prior to formal literacy instruction. The diagram below summarises what is required.

Children learn from what they experience and from their perception of that experience. Exposure to literacy experiences is vital for young children if they are to become proficient in literacy themselves. From observing others reading, being read to themselves and engaging in talk about print helps to familiarise children with the joy of reading and writing. In addition to familiarity with print, children need a range of skills for proficiency in literacy.

Cognitive Skills

Poor cognitive skills affect a child's ability to learn. A child must be able to comprehend what is happening around them, cause and effect and how things work. Ability to concentrate and pay attention is vital for learning. Music is attention grabbing and pleasurable and therefore an ideal vehicle for early learning. Children need to understand sequence and to be able to predict what might follow in a sequence or a particular event. This affects comprehension and fluency and a child's ability to learn. Automaticity is a person's ability to recognise and process information and perform actions without undue effort. It impacts reading and writing fluency. Automaticity is achieved through practise. Music offers an ideal means for repetitive practise which is enjoyable and motivational. In order to become literate children must engage visual and auditory memory in order to decode and encode language sounds. Muscle memory is required for writing. Movement to music helps to embed memory.

Language Skills

For effective literacy, children must possess good language skills - listening and speaking. They must be able to comprehend spoken language and to produce spoken language. Children who struggle with pronunciation ultimately struggle with spelling. Possession of a good vocabulary ensures that children are not slowed down by unfamiliar words and that they have sufficient choice of words to express themselves well.

Children learn language skills through use. The greater exposure children have to spoken language the greater their comprehension and vocabulary will be. The greater opportunity children have to use language, the greater their language production will be. Children learn when situations are natural and especially when they are joyful. Songs, rhymes, stories and musical stories provide perfect activities through which children can learn language and participation in production offers ideal practise for young children. Action songs and rhymes reinforce language and the use of gesture is correlated with proficiency in spoken language.

The use of music for singing adds a further dimension to simple recitation. The addition of music helps to facilitate fluency of production as a singer must keep up with the music. The singer must also learn the melody in addition to the lyrics; this requires increased brain capacity, utilising both sides of the brain and requiring increased memory capacity. As children get older, synapses (brain connections) die off in a process knows as synaptic pruning. Synapses which are not used are lost, hence it is better to activate synapses in youth in order to keep them.

The ability of children to tune in to musical sounds is a precursor to being able to tune in to language sounds. Children who can discriminate musical sounds are ultimately better able to discriminate language sounds. This helps children to pronounce the sounds correctly themselves; good pronunciation leads to good spelling.

Prosodic Awareness

Prosodic awareness in language is also correlated with literacy success and awareness of intonation and stress can be promoted through musical activities and a teacher drawing attention to prosodic elements in music such as happy/sad and how a crisp, high note may infer surprise or ornaments in music such as use of a trill to represent a bird sound for example.

Phonological Awareness

Research has shown that after language, the main indicator for literacy success is phonological awareness (the awareness of the sound segments within words). There are three levels - syllables, onset and rimes and phonemes. The ability to divide a word into syllables subsequently eases the process of spelling.

When songs are set to syllabic music (one language syllable is sung to one music note) singing automatically helps children to syllabify as it is easy to recognise when the note changes. The rhythm of the music matches the syllables. Keeping in time to music by clapping, tapping or stamping along to a beat helps to entrain the brain to sound. Inability to keep a beat indicates that the brain is atypical in perceiving sounds; this is a problem identified for those with dyslexia. It is possible that early intervention could help to ameliorate these difficulties.

The ability to identify and match rhymes enables children to ultimately match sound to spelling patterns. Early exposure to rhyme increases awareness of sounds in words and facilitates word play; the ability to identify and match rhymes if correlated with literacy proficiency. Rhyming prose is remembered easier than non-rhyming, but singing rhymes is even better, as adding melody to lyrics helps to invoke better memory than recitation alone.

Every syllable possesses a vowel or vowel sound and may contain an onset and a rime (note the spelling of 'rime' in this context). The onset is the grapheme (letter or combination of letters representing a single language sound) or graphemes before the vowel (eg l in log, sh in ship, or cl in claw ). The rime is the vowel and following graphemes in a syllable (eg 'ong' in the word 'strong' or 'ake' in the word 'cake'). Sometimes there is no onset, for example in the word 'ant'.

The strongest indicator of literacy proficiency is phonemic awareness. Children must be able to identify individual sounds (phonemes) within words in order to decode and encode them. Teaching children to tune in to sounds in music is an ideal precursor to being able to tune in to language sounds.

Motor Skills

The motoric nature of music incites children to move. Movement stimulates the brain and improves the capacity to learn. Moving to music enhances a child's capacity to keep in time. Although not an obvious literacy skill, poor motor skills correlate with poor literacy. The ability to co-ordinate one's body, keep a beat, move in time and balance affect overall functioning. Most people have a dominant side and a supportive side, which determines left or right handedness, both sides must work together.

Bodily movement is controlled by the part of brain called the cerebellum. It is responsible for the co-ordination and timing of movement. Most interestingly, it is also controls the production of speech and specifically the sequencing of syllables as it controls the brain, throat, voicebox and lips. The cerebellum may also have a role in speech perception. The cerebellum therefore provides a link between movement and language, which may explain why some children have difficulty in both areas.

Participation in musical activities has a wide range of additional benefits. When people sing in groups, cortisol (stress hormone) is reduced and oxytocin (happiness hormone) is secreted. Music assists memory retention, is attention-grabbing and enjoyable and when many areas of the brain are stimulated together, a greater number of synapses are used, thereby enhancing the capacity of the brain; music in effect exercises the brain.

Research Project

In the light of this substantial evidence of music's potential impact on the development of early literacy skills, a short research project was undertaken on fifteen pre-school children aged 3 to 5 years, over a period of nine weeks, to measure the progress of literacy skill development through musical activities.

Literacy through Music Program Design

A specially designed musical activity program was delivered - Sounds and Symbols Literacy through Music Program. The program was designed to specifically target the development of pre-literacy skills as identified in the diagram illustrated above.

Data Collection

Three adults, including myself, were allocated five children each for observation. The children's skill levels were recorded each week as 'not evident', 'building' or 'competent'. The program ran for forty minutes once per week. If a skill was not undertaken or demonstrated then it was not recorded. If it was clear that a child did not have a skill then it was recorded as 'not evident'. Where there was some evidence of a skill being demonstrated but maybe not consistently, then it was recorded as 'building'. Where a child clearly demonstrated competence then it was recorded as 'competent'.

Literacy Skills recorded:

Follow instructions (language comprehension)

Predict what is coming next - activity or word in a sequence (sequencing and prediction)

Co-ordination of body movements (motor skills)

Remember lyrics to a song or rhyme (memory and language production)

Identification of syllables (syllabification)

Ability to maintain a beat (motor and perception)

Ability to clap a rhythm (motor and perception)

Generate a rhyming word (vocabulary and rhyme)

Identify an initial sound in a word (phonemic awareness)

Recognition of letter sounds (sound to symbol correspondence)

Each session, children's skill performances were coded red, yellow or green (not evident, building or evident, respectively).

The data was collected and is summarised in the following diagram:

Results

The results show a normal distribution of competencies with outliers of one child showing evidence of skill at the beginning of the project and four children not achieving competence by the end of the project but building skills towards competence. All children showed progress in literacy skill development. Seventy-three percent of children achieved competence in the early literacy skills observed over the nine week period. Except for one, all children did not demonstrate any degree of competency in any of the skills at the beginning of the project.

Limitations

It is not possible to claim that competency built was due to the musical activities undertaken as it is impossible to account for other activities in school or at home that children many have participated in which may have contributed to literacy skill development over the same time period.

Skills recorded were only those that could be observed. For example, after the project, parents were invited to join in a session. One parent reported that her child had insisted that the parent learn all the songs and actions prior to coming to school and the child had taught her parent every activity from the sessions. This particular child was very quiet in the sessions and unless the parent had reported this after the event, there would have been no way of knowing that the child had learnt so much.

Implications and Recommendations

Although all progress could not be identified as causal to the musical activities undertaken, it is reasonable to suggest that the activities had contributed to the early literacy skills identified, for example where a new song or rhyme had been learnt, which is unlikely to have been learnt elsewhere in the same time period. If the children had not been taught to clap out syllables in words prior to the project then unless someone else had been teaching them the same thing at the same time, it is unlikely that the children had learnt this skill elsewhere.

As all children made progress in early literacy skill development over the period of undertaking the activities it can be stated that the activities were in no way detrimental to literacy skill development and most probably contributed to development.

As a teacher/observer it is possible to see the progress that is being made and how the activities are supporting the development of listening skills, ability to tune in to sound, language comprehension and production and phonological awareness. These skills in themselves do not teach children to read and write, but without these foundational skills children are unlikely to make the desired progress once they begin the formal process of learning to match sounds to symbols. It is logical that the ability to attune to language sounds must come before the learning of the symbolic representation of these sounds, hence the title of my book 'Sound Before Symbol - Developing Literacy through Music'.

My recommendations are for all early years practitioners to learn how to use musical activities to promote early literacy skills. To this end I have developed a series of ten webinars 'Literacy Unlocked', available at: https://meldsys.co.uk/eduweb

I have also developed resources in the form of a Literacy through Music Resource Pack for Early Years Practitioners (contact me directly for further information).

Supportive videos are also available on Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/c/SandSBKPMeldSys

Two rhyming story books and a musical alphabet book are also available on Amazon - My Cat Ben, Sally's Day at the Sales and Alphabet Book + More