Back to School Series

How can musical training enhance language skills, vocabulary and empathy skills in pupils? 📚🎶

Introduction

As the school year approaches, there is no better time to look into how music and musical training improve behaviour, empathy, language, vocabulary and analytical thinking and how it’s linked to overall academic performance in children and young adults.

Multiple studies suggest that the correlations between being musically trained and learning a musical instrument, participating in a choir, or an ensemble improve brain development (particularly in the prefrontal cortex) and are directly linked to supporting memory, cognitive behaviour, linguistic skills and emotional control. *

I have taken the time to deep dive into the extensive research that is available and summarise how musical training can be beneficial in early childhood development and how directly links to academic success.

Let’s Dive Into it

1. Music and Emotional Intelligence

There is always that one song that brings an emotion to us. Be it a song that our parents sang to us at bedtime, or the song we chose for our first dance. Music brings emotions to life. With that said, it is not a surprise that children who are musically trained show traits in emotional maturity and reading emotions in others.

Studies suggest that when children participate in group music lessons, workshops, music ensembles, orchestras and choirs, they need to pay close attention to the emotional state of each performer so that they can perform better. Research on how children perform during and after those classes shows that those activities help kids develop emotional intelligence and empathy, both skills needed to achieve good results in academic settings. *

2. Linguistics and Language Skills

Music requires a lot of listening. By receiving musical training, a child uses more than one of their senses and listening is one that is highly involved. Following simple echo games (repeating a simple melody pattern, clapping out a rhythm) or by listening to a piece of music and trying to distinguish patterns in the melody, we use the same parts of the auditory system as we do in speech. 
With that said, musical training has been shown to improve an individual’s ability to expand on vocabulary, learn a new language and improve understanding of phonetics for pronouncing new words. Those same mechanisms also help children develop verbal fluency, memory and reading abilities. 

3. Links between Music, Analytical thinking and Decision making abilities

Learning to play a musical instrument involves managing multiple tasks at the same time. It has a large attention and memory demand and coordination demand. Learning a piece of music requires the ability to read a new music text and execute it either by singing it out or playing it on a musical instrument.
Those skills are later easily transferable to other academic tasks, and research suggests higher academic performance in pupils who are musically trained in comparison to children who do not undertake any musical training. In children, musical training can be seen as additional schooling that demands focused attention, memory and progressive technical skill. Those skills can develop self-control, analytical thinking and focused attention, which have been shown to increase academic success. 

Conclusion

As we’ve reached the end of the first part of the “Tuning the Classroom” series, we can confidently say that there are clear links between musical training and how it helps pupils develop essential skills and achieve higher academic results.

Music is a tool that helps us express emotion, listen for differences, improve our memory and attention spam and increase our ability to focus on tasks.

Musical training, also supports organisational skills, time management, and self-discipline which are needed to show progress when learning a musical instrument.

All of the above are skills that can easily be transferred to other academic studies and help pupils yield high results.

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References

• Habibi, Assal, Beatriz Ilari, Kevin Crimi, Michael Metke, Jonas T. Kaplan, Anand A. Joshi, Richard M. Leahy et al. “An equal start: absence of group differences in cognitive, social, and neural measures prior to music or sports training in children.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 690.
• Diamond A (2002) Normal Development of Prefrontal Cortex from Birth to Young Adulthood: Cognitive functions, anatomy, and biochemistry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 466–503.
• Paus T (2001) Primate anterior cingulate cortex: Where motor control, drive and cognition interface. Nat Rev Neurosci 2: 417–424.
• Best, J.R., Miller, P.H. and Jones, L.L., 2009. Executive functions after age 5: Changes and correlates. Developmental review, 29(3), pp.180-200.
• Miendlarzewska EA, Trost WJ. How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward and other modulating variables. Front Neurosci. 2014 Jan 20;7:279. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00279. PMID: 24672420; PMCID: PMC3957486.