HARMONIZING THE WRITING PROCESS WITH MUSIC TRAINING TECHNIQUES

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS

Harmonizing the writing process with music training techniques presents how classroom composition can be strengthened through music-based exercises. It addresses students’ divided attention from personal audio devices, reviews research on the Mozart effect and music education’s impact on listening, communication, reasoning, and decision-making, and summarizes findings that music activities improve collaborative and organizational abilities. It then proposes practical strategies aligning musical training—scales, theory, and performance practice—with writing stages from brainstorming to revision, emphasizing shared prompts and varied interpretation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages3

Reading Time8 min

AccessFree to download

Harmonizing the Writing Process with Music Training Techniques

Problem in the Composition Classroom

Research Background: Mozart Effect and Music Education

Findings Across Ages and Training Levels

Practical Classroom Implementation

Linking Music Performance to Writing Practice

Collaboration, Interpretation, and Student Output

The CEA Forum Winter/Spring 2009: 38.1 Next: Book Review HARMONIZING THE WRITING PROCESS WITH MUSIC TRAINING TECHNIQUES Nancy Riecken Dorothy Sayers said,“Students must be taught to think.” That's an important goal in the composition classroom. How can I get through to students, however, when their ears contain tiny headphones that are connected to hidden iPods? Their music seems to have much greater charms to soothe them than do my lesson objectives. Music's charms are often taken for granted. The popular Mozart Effect, coined by Rauscher, Shaw and Ky in 1993, has been incorporated in many academic settings to help improve student comprehension and raise spatial-temporal reasoning scores in standard tests. Can music help students become better thinkers and writers? Over the past three years I have incorporated some basic music training techniques in my classrooms to help me teach the writing process to students who would otherwise click me off. The students have developed clearer thinking and organizational skills and have increased their collaborative and communication abilities as a result. This article first briefly overviews basic research and then offers practical advice for incorporating musical training exercises in the English composition classroom. A wealth of recent research evaluates not only the effects of music listening on left brain-right brain learning transfers, or spatial-temporal reasoning (see Bower; Campbell; Grandin, Peterson, and Shaw; Habermeyer; Perret and Fox; Rauscher, Shaw and Ky; Young), but also the role of music education in communication processes (see Feller and Gibbs-Griffith; Gruber and Harman; Kumuyi; Suzuki) . Musical training, these researchers have found, affects listening, communication, reasoning, and decision-making skills at all levels. Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky's early studies on the Mozart effect sparked a controversy that has since led researchers both to confirm and deny music's effect on learning at various age levels (Bower; Crncec, Wilson, and Prior; Jones, West, and Estell) . Some educators have found that, by introducing a variety of music activities into the classroom, student morale, discipline, and academic achievement is improved (Grandin, Peterson, and Shaw; Feller and Gibbs-Griffith; Young) . Research with a range of students, from elementary to college, does indicate that students of any age who participate in music activities demonstrate stronger communicative and reasoning skills than those who do not. Students who have some form of music training tend to work more effectively in groups and are able to process multiple tasks more efficiently and more effectively than students who have had no music training. This is true whether students have been exposed to formal or informal training over a short period of time or several years, and at varying ages (Feller and Gibbs-Griffith; Gruber and Harman; Suzuki) . In order to do some practical research for the sake of improving my own teaching techniques, I have asked my students to describe their own background in music. Students with hands-on musical experience (playing an instrument, singing in a chorus, or reading music) have consistently demonstrated better listening, communication, and reasoning skills than students whose experience with music is limited only to listening to any form at all, thus confirming in my classrooms the above-cited research. For these students, the experience is both aural and physical. Multiple skills are developed and used at once. Students who can think through a musical score can transfer their skills to the writing process. Most composition classrooms cover the ground rules of standard sentence structure, the order of composition according to genre, and the collaborative methods employed for effective communication to take place. Music educators parallel this structure when they teach scales, theory, and orchestration techniques. By combining oral and written exercises

FAQs

What classroom challenge does the author describe at the start?

Students often use hidden audio devices, so their music distracts them from lesson objectives and makes it harder for the instructor to reach them.

What does the article review about research on music and learning?

It summarizes studies on the Mozart effect and on music education’s influence on listening, communication, reasoning, and decision-making, including evidence that music activities can improve these skills.

How does the author connect music training exercises to teaching writing?

The author parallels musical instruction (scales, theory, orchestration) with writing activities, using shared prompts and musical score thinking to help students transfer skills to composition, revision, and effective group work.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS