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Geoff Johnson: How music can help kids learn to read

People, regardless of their ethnic heritage or culture, have been involved with music for a long time.
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Music prepares children for learning to read and it supports them as they continue their reading journey, writes Geoff Johnson. ADRIAN LAM, TIMES COLONIST

People, regardless of their ethnic heritage or culture, have been involved with music for a long time.

According to National Geographic, a 40,000-year-old vulture-bone flute is the world’s oldest musical instrument, and no doubt there was music for listening and performing long before that.

Whether we just listen to music, any kind of music, or perform music or, at a more sophisticated level, delve into the theory of what makes music actually qualify as music and not just sound, our brains are activated in different ways — but they are activated.

Two University of Central Florida professors, neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya and world-renowned violinist Ayako Yonetani, have been exploring how music affects brain function and human behaviour.

Their research centres primarily on how music can reduce stress, pain and even symptoms of depression.

But more interesting to educators, and not just music educators, Sugaya and Yonetani have determined that music can play a role in improving cognitive and motor skills, spatial-temporal learning and neurogenesis — the brain’s ability to produce neurons.

Sugaya and Yonetani’s research confirms what we have all observed about the effect of music on loved ones suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s — people whose response to the world around them is muted, but who still respond positively to music as the brain re-activates.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Martin J. Bergee from the University of Kansas conducted a study of 1,000 middle-school students to see if there was any link between music education and increased performance in other cognitive disciplines, such as math and reading.

After carefully eliminating the influences of environment or demographic factors, Bergee and his co-author Kevin M. Weingarten were surprised to find that learning music did appear to make students better mathematicians and readers.

Their findings have been published in the Journal of Research in Music Education.

Another researcher, Dr. Anita Collins of the University of Canberra (Australia), author of The Music Advantage: How Learning music Helps Your Child’s Brain and Wellbeing, says that while many studies seem to confirm that children who play music tend to perform better at school, researchers need to ask “why?” instead of just assuming a correlation between the two.

Collins sees Bergee’s study as supporting a holistic approach to education and writes that “music education should be viewed as a vital part of a larger view of education where lots of different experiences will assist. It’s about the education of the whole child. And music, from this research, seems to be part of that.”

Other neuroscientists suggest that music processing and language development share an overlapping network in the brain. From an evolutionary perspective, they say, the human brain developed music processing well before language and then used that processing to create and learn language.

The same brain researchers tell us that our auditory processing network is the first and largest information-gathering system in our brains. Music can enhance the biological building blocks for language. It prepares children for learning to read and it supports them as they continue their reading journey.

Much of the research into the connection between the experience of music and learning to read boils down to the fact that reading is ultimately about making meaning from the words on the page. That skill includes the ability to distinguish between the sounds in words.

Fluency in reading includes the ability to choose the correct inflection, such as a question or an exclamation. Such highly developed auditory processing skills are, the researchers say, enhanced by the experience of the nuances of music.

So what can parents, especially the parents of preschool children, do about all this? Looking for classes that include movement activities, singing and responding to both sound and silence as well as providing good quality music-making toys and instruments seems to be a good start.

And for kids — what kinds of music should they be encouraged to listen to? Well, music they like is a good start, and music adults and kids can enjoy together (at least some of the time) can bring the same mutual enjoyment as reading together.

But children, like most adults, need to do more than just listen. In most cultures, singing, dancing, clapping and just moving all play a part in benefiting from music.

The joy of music has never been the sole preserve of those who claim to understand the magic and logical complexity of Bach’s endless canons.

As Elvis put it: “I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.”

Geoff Johnson is a former Superintendent of Schools. gfjohnson4@shaw.ca