Listening to music while reading and writing in Sophomore English

Over the course of my first year as a teacher of a Sophomore English high school class, I have changed my attitudes about allowing students to listen to music while reading silently and working on their comprehension questions in class. The students were very vocal about advocating for this freedom to listen to music, and claimed that listening to their headphones allowed them to be more productive and focused on their tasks. Since an experienced English teacher in our high school allows headphones during individual work time, especially during creative writing tasks, I decided to allow students to listen to music on their headphones. Our school has a policy against listening to music on headphones since the teachers are unable to determine whether this music is appropriate for a school setting. However, teachers can decide to allow headphones and personal music devices in their own classrooms.
I recently researched this issue on the internet, to see what studies I could locate about the effects of music (especially student-selected music played through headphones vs. teacher-selected background music) on academic performance. I located an interesting blog post entitled "Does background music aid or impair reading comprehension?" This posting included results from a study of 7th and 8th grade students who listened to "top hit singles" while peforming on the Gates-MacGinitie reading test. Sunny Lee, the author of this post, summarized the results of this 2-day test with 334 7th and 8th grade students: "The results indicate that overall, background music is actually detrimental to work and study."

However, Lee goes on to say that, "studies have shown that emotional arousal and mood produced by music may be the important factor affecting performance, raising the possibility that gentle, relaxing music could boost cognitive performance under certain circumstances." In my classroom, I felt that there was a positive effect produced by the students self-selected music in the areas of emotion and motivation. Some of the students really disliked the tasks of reading and writing, yet these tasks seemed less onerous when they were allowed to engage in an activity associated with very positive emotions--listening to their own music.

On the blog site, Teachers at Risk, Elona Hartjes shared some of her research into this issue. The quotes from Nina Jackson's (cautiously) optimistic research results match my classroom observations of the Sophomore English students this year. In some situations, the positive effects of music can energize students, increase their motivation levels and boost their level of effort on tasks that they may not enjoy : Nina Jackson In her article “Music and the Mind” suggests that although more research needs to be done, we can be cautiously optimistic about the potential benefits of listening to music to motivate students, improve concentration and study skills. She supports the use of music in the classroom. In fact, she calls music the new teaching tool for the 21st century.

Elona Harjes quotes Nina Jackson as saying,

"Music plays with your state of mind as the electrical energy generated by firing neurons creates brain waves. The music a person chooses to listen to can influence the waves’ frequency, and their state of mind. It’s not only the mind that is influenced by music, the body also responds. Musical messages travel down the spinal cord, impacting the autonomous nervous system that regulates the heart rate, blood pressure, muscular activity, metabolism, and other vital functions…

Energizing music can make your brain exercise longer and harder. It increases speed and workload capacity … music with a strong steady beat can increase endurance, boost effort level, increase motivation and distract from discomfort and agitation."