The Impact of Musical Texts on the Text Recall of Young Learners of English in Isfahan Junior High Schools

Abstract

Although music possesses a kind of power and using it has been welcomed by many students in language classrooms, it seems that they take a non-serious image of the lesson while listening to songs and they may think that it is a matter of fun. The main objective of the present study was to investigate whether learning a foreign language through musical texts (songs) can have an impact on students’ text recall ability in junior high schools. The participants were 90 students who were divided into three groups; two experimental and one control. Three cloze tests (fill in the blanks) were made based on the song lyrics, to measure students’ text recall. All the students took the tests after listening to the songs and text passages. After four weeks of no treatment, the same tests were taken to measure students’ delayed text recall. The data were obtained by counting the total number of words that were recalled. For the analysis of data One-Way ANOVA was employed, the results of which indicated that the speech group significantly outperformed the music group for songs 1 and 2. However, delayed text recall results showed no significant difference between the two groups. This study found that music was not of much help for the students and it sometimes played a distracting role.