Teaching literary history with music: A classroom experiment

Abstract

In Dutch Literature classes in the Netherlands, song lyrics are often treated as poems, regrettably neglecting the music. Recent research has provided evidence for various processes that suggest that playing songs would enhance the literary-historical learning of a class. Music can support motivation, attention and retention, and may clarify language by accentuating prosody and adding emotion. In an educational design experiment, including a repeated measures recall test, it was assessed whether playing a song only once or twice can heighten the learning efficiency of a literary history class. Five groups of fifth-grade pre-university high-school students (131 pupils; Mean age = 16.47; SD = 0.64), each with a different teacher, received a series of classes on 16th- and 17th-century Dutch literature. As part of these classes, they read a number of poems, half of which were also read aloud by their teachers, while the other half were also played to them as songs with music. However, which poems they heard with music and which they heard without differed for each group. Two recall tests indicated that both verbatim and gist recall for texts presented with music is better than for texts read aloud, indicating comprehension and a basis for historical reasoning. In addition, two evaluation surveys showed enhanced attention, motivation and historical insight.