The effects of background music on the reading performance of Taiwanese ESL students

The purpose of this study was to see what kinds of effects classical music and hip hop music have on the performance of a second language reading comprehension test in Taiwanese college students. According to Kahneman's (1973) capacity model for attention, one may fail to perform an activity because the supply of attention needed for multiple tasks does not meet the demand needed to perform each of the tasks. This explains why students perform better or worse on different cognitive tasks with certain types of background media. An experiment involving 123 participants from a medium size college in southern Taiwan was conducted where the participants performed a reading comprehension test while listening to either classical music, hip hop music, or with no music in the background. Using a two-way factorial ANOVA, the results of the study yielded no statistically significance. However, a post hoc test indicated that the reading comprehension score for the control group was significantly different than the reading comprehension score for the hip hop music group. This showed that playing hip hop music in the background had a greater effect on the performance of a reading comprehension test as compared to classical music or with no music. This was in accordance with the original hypothesis and with the idea that music that is perceived distractive will have a greater effect on task performance and concentration.