Let's Bring Back the Magic of Song for Teaching Reading

Abstract

Based on a first grade teacher's search for approaches to promote successful reading acquisition in her first grade classroom, the authors present a curricular engagement in which the teacher explored using music, specifically singing songs, as a fun and motivating way to accelerate reading progress. The premise is that singing (while at the same time having a visual display of the words in the songs) can be a very useful instructional tool to teach reading to beginning readers. The process involves learning one new song (accompanied by the printed lyrics) per week, followed by repeated readings/singings, discussions of content, and activities related to phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and word work. The children made on average more than a year's reading growth during the duration of the teacher's investigation. This article explores the possibilities and benefits of having beginning and/or struggling readers sing as an instructional strategy to enhance reading progress.

Using performance methods to enhance students' reading fluency

“…The authors (Iwasaki et al, 2013) described student growth over an entire school year and the results revealed that all but one student made at least one year's growth in reading; however, several students exceeded the average reading growth for the year. While the results were impressive, the data were limited to the Developmental Reading Assessment (Beaver, 1997) levels, and did not include the specifics on reading fluency measures.…”

“…Although Iwasaki et al (2013) implemented the musical activity comprehensively (i.e., word study, writing, comprehension), the method could be modified to target reading fluency. Singing while reading already possesses two important elements of a fluency building activity-repeated readings and an opportunity to perform.…”

Readers Theatre: effects on word recognition automaticity and reading prosody

“…Iwasaki et al () described another performance method where students learned one or two songs each week while reading the words as they sang. After implementing this karaoke‐type classroom activity for an entire school year, all but one student made at least one year's growth in reading and several students exceeded the expectation for reading growth.…”

El contador de historias y la máquina del sonido: una aproximación a las interacciones musicales en la vida y obra de Roald Dahl

“…Este juego bidireccional en el ámbito de los sonidos del lenguaje a través de la canción pueden ser una puerta de entrada al desarrollo de la conciencia fonética, fonémica y fonológica. La naturaleza de la rima de la mayoría de las letras de las canciones también proporciona a los profesores excelentes recursos para la enseñanza de las familias de palabras en relación con los distintos campos semánticos trabajados en el aula (Iwasaki et al 2013) La canción en la obra de Roald Dahl La forma canción, como el propio Dahl reconoce (Sturrock, 2010), es un elemento que utiliza de manera casi sistemática a lo largo de toda su obra como recurso, a modo de aria narrativa, para la caracterización de roles y personajes. Sirva como ejemplo una de las obras más paradigmáticas de autor, Charlie y la Fábrica de Chocolate; en ella Dahl incluye cinco canciones escritas con la intención de intensificar ciertos aspectos, acciones o acontecimientos ocurridos, o por suceder en la narración, y que constituyen un vehículo para la apelación directa al lector.…”