Samplings

Connecting Music and Reading

Many schools and districts require increased reading instruction time and mandate that all teachers take a role in reading intervention, including music teachers. Many general music teachers feel inadequately prepared to teach reading skills.

Suzanne N. Hall and Nicole R. Robinson point out the similarities and parallels between music and reading in their article “Music and Reading: Finding Connections from Within” in the October 2012 issue of General Music Today. They aim to equip music teachers with reading terminology, discuss reading processes and instructional practices that mirror music learning processes and instructional practices, and present music activities that explicitly demonstrate how music teachers currently support language learning in the music classroom. The authors focus on the parallels between music and the five components of reading instruction outlined by the National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

In addition to drawing parallels between the two disciplines for these five components, Hall and Robinson provide a sample activity for each component with extended activities. For example, to develop fluency, the sample shows four short music phrases that use repetition to help solidify melodic patterns (e.g., sol–mi) and various rhythmic patterns. The fluent reader appropriately pauses and changes emphasis and tone. In music, fluency relates to rhythm perceptions and patterns of sound and silence.

Read “Music and Reading: Finding Connections from Within” in the October 2012 General Music Today, now available online.

Perceived Teacher Effectiveness with Positive and Negative Feedback

Feedback helps students gauge how they are doing. Rebecca B. MacLeod and Jessica Napoles examined preservice teachers’ perceptions of teaching effectiveness. Their volunteers were upper-division music education majors—forty instrumentalists and twenty-five vocalists, of which thirty-six were women and thirty-nine, men.

Experienced teachers were videotaped in a simulated applied music lesson and were unknown to the participants. Half were women and half were men. The teachers were asked to instruct “students” as if they were beginners and to model using an instrument or the voice. MacLeod and Napoles were the mock students but were never in view of the camera. Before videotaping, all teachers watched a model lesson demonstrating high positive or high negative feedback. Half the teachers used high positive feedback (four approvals and one disapproval), and the other half used high negative feedback (four disapprovals and one approval).

Volunteers viewed the teaching clips and rated each teacher on demeanor and effectiveness. The ratings showed the following top-down order of perceived effectiveness: positive female teachers, positive male teachers, negative female teachers, and negative male teachers. There was a significant difference between men and women teachers. The women were rated as more effective than the men within like feedback conditions; the negative male teachers were perceived as more negative than were the negative female teachers.

To learn more about the study, read “Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Teaching Effectiveness during Teaching Episodes with Positive and Negative Feedback,” by Rebecca B. MacLeod and Jessica Napoles, in the October 2012 issue of Journal of Music Teacher Education, now available online.

Motivating Music Learning

Peter D. MacIntyre, Gillian K. Potter, and Jillian N. Barnes wanted to know how Robert C. Gardner’s socio-educational model of learning a second language would work if applied to study instrumental music learning. In their words, “at the heart of the proposed model is a multifaceted description of the relationships among motivation, attitudes, anxiety, support from others, perceived competence, and achievement” (July 2012 JRME, p. 130).

Working with 107 high school band students, the researchers found that “the adapted and expanded socio-educational model fit very well” and “described key motivational structures.”

The investigators concluded that “The key support for motivation to learn was supplied by integrativeness (an interest in taking on the characteristics of musicians, positive attitudes toward learning instruments, and an interest in music learning) plus attitudes toward the learning situation (music teacher and course).”

MacIntyre, Potter, and Barnes’s recent research, “The Socio-Educational Model of Music,” was published in the July 2012 Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME), volume 60, number 2, pages 129–44. (NAfME members can purchase a JRME subscription by contacting Member Services at 800-828-0229 between 8:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. ET or by e-mailing memberservices@nafme2.org.)

Name That Tune!

According to a 1984 Journal of Musicology article by J. Parakilas, orchestra programs in the late nineteenth century created a “classical repertory” that consisted of “certain old works that should be kept ever-popular, ever-present, [and] ever-new” (vol. 3, p. 3). A number of pieces of this standard repertoire are still heard in concert halls today.

Kimberly VanWeelden, in the November 2012 issue of Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, noted that classical music and themes from this genre are now found in many places outside the traditional concert hall, including “movies, television, radio, video games, and the Internet and as cellular phone ringtones,” where they are often relegated to a background role.

VanWeelden suggests that “the idea that some classical music could be considered popular music as well, at least in cultural terms, is evident in everyday life.” She wanted to find out which classical music might be “familiar and predictable to adolescent students.”

For subject in her study, VanWeelden used 668 middle and high school students attending a summer music camp at a large college of music in the southeastern United States. These students represented band, orchestra, and choral performance, as well as piano and guitar.

From a repertoire selected from an online list, Classical Music’s Top 100 Greatest Hits, VanWeelden chose thirty pieces and split them into two playlists. (She made sure the music on her lists had also been heard frequently in ordinary cultural contexts.) She shortened these to thirty- to forty-five-second excerpts. After obtaining parental consent for her participants, she tested the students in small groups, asking them if they had heard the piece and where, and to give the name of the piece if known.

Some 87 percent of the students had heard the music before the study, but only three pieces—“Flight of the Bumblebee,” “Hallelujah Chorus,” and “Pomp and Circumstance” were correctly identified by title by 50 percent of the students.

Read the entire article, “Classical Music as Popular Music: Adolescents’ Recognition of Western Art Music,” in the November 2012 Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, now available online. (NAfME members can read this and other Update articles at no charge by logging in to www.nafme.org and clicking “Resources” on the top banner, then “Periodicals” on the left-hand banner.)