Phonological And Phonemic Awareness

Having musical education early in one's life have been seen to help develop brain areas involved in language and reading. As children listen to music, they hear differences in sounds, assisting them not only with music making, but also with speech. According to many educational researchers, having early musical instruction to young children is able to expand their listening skills, vocabulary, verbal memory, and phonological and phonemic awareness. All of these skills in turn greatly impact the way language is developed in a child. The ability to listen is the foundation upon which language, reading and writing are developed. Listening is a very important part of school learning, with an estimated fifty to seventy-five percent of a student's

Phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. Phonemic awareness is a more refined version of phonological awareness in that phonemic awareness is an understanding that words can be divided into a sequence of phonemes. "Children’s level of phonemic awareness on entering school may be the single most powerful determinant of the success he or she will experience in learning to read”. In order to become a fluent reader, children must understand that every individual word is made up of discrete sounds, and having that knowledge can in turn be used to decipher "reading" and build words. Because of this, children with a stronger sense of phonological and phonemic awareness are more successful in learning how to read compared to those without these skills. This is further examined by the Suzuki method of musical pedagogy. The Suzuki method encourages the exposure of music education at a young age so that the learning of music is as natural as a child’s ability to learn their native language. Spoken language is formed through a verbal stream of connected phonemes, whereas music is comprised of a series of distinct musical notes and tones. The skill required to understand a spoken sentence requires a person to successfully process the sounds of individual phonemes, in combination of processing the intonation

Gromko uncovered evidence that children involved in musical education showed improved phonemic awareness. The study called for an experimental group which was made of four classrooms. These classrooms would receive musical instruction for four months, thirty minutes once per week. Another separate four classrooms at a nearby elementary school would receive no form of musical education and would serve as the control group. All of the students (in the total of eight classrooms), would be tested using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). All of the students in the study would be given the same number of minutes of reading instruction during the test. The data found that the students in the four classrooms who had received musical instruction for four months had remarkably higher gains in phonemic awareness compared to the control group. Gromko believes that the experimental group of students that received musical instruction most likely had benefited from aural development that comes from musical instruction. “When children learn to discriminate fine differences between tonal and rhythmic patterns and to associate their perceptions with visual symbols, they will benefit not only musically but in skills related to the processing of sound shown to be necessary for