Musik i språkfrämjande syfte : En interventionsstudie om musikundervisning och fonemisk medvetenhet i förskoleklass

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate a practice-based teaching method where music and rhythm are used as didactic tools to promote phonemic awareness in preschool class. Phonemic awareness is crucial for early reading and writing skills, and the diversity of students’ prior knowledge at the start of preschool class requires differentiating teaching methods. The study is theoretically grounded in sociocultural theory regarding learning and interaction as well as cognitive perspectives like auditory timing and transfer effects. This study involves a group of Swedish students in the same preschool class at the age of 6-7 years old. Two 45–60-minute music- and rhythm-based lessons were conducted focusing on auditory timing and pitch processing. To measure the effect on the student’s phonemic awareness, specifically phoneme synthesis and phoneme segmentation, a pre- and post-test from the standardized assessment tool LegiLexi were used. Furthermore, a structured student questionnaire with visual scales were used to capture students’ subjective experiences of the different music- and rhythm-based activities. The result indicates that the music- and rhythm-based intervention had some positive effect on the student’s phonemic awareness, particularly in their ability to synthesize phonemes. Furthermore, the questionnaire result showed that a majority of the students experienced the teaching method as fun and enjoyable. The findings suggest that music can function as a motivating, successful didactic tool in language education to support early language development.