| The purpose of this study was to determine if listening comprehension could be enhanced by providing an integrated message to the receiver. The integrated message was to be composed of oral discourse, in the form of storyreading, and music segments that were intended to reflect the characters and action of the story. The music was composed specifically for this study in a series of themes or motives.;The scores obtained in this manner were rank-ordered for each group in the study. They were then compared by using the Mann-Whitney U test. Application of this test to the rank-ordered scores showed that the experimental group scores were not significantly different from those of the control group.;Although it was shown that the addition of music segments did not increase the number of episodes recalled by students in this study, there are indications of areas for future study. It is possible that the addition of music segments can influence which specific episodes are recalled by listeners. It is possible that listening comprehension, as a cognitive process, has identifiable age-related attributes that alter with the age of the listener.;A two group post-test only design was selected to implement the study. The population studied was second grade students in international schools in northwestern Europe. The independent variable was the addition of music to the story reading heard by the experimental group. The assessment of the dependent variable took the form of individual free oral recalls. The recalls were tape-recorded and completely transcribed for each subject in the study. These transcriptions were read and evaluated for the presence of episodes recalled from the story. The story was divided into episodes according to linguistic and non-linguistic cues that illustrated change of time, place, character, intent, or the completion of a goal. Each of these episodes appearing in the subject recalls was identified and labelled. The number of episodes recalled by each student was added, and this sum was transformed into a score by assigning one point for each episode recalled. |
