The Influence Of Musical Training On Chinese And English Phonological Awareness Of Elementary School Students

The relationship between musical training and phonological processing has attracted the interest of some foreign researchers,and some progress has been made.However,there are few researches on English as a second language in the background of tonal Chinese.In a number of studies,phonological awareness,as one of the three main components of phonological processing,has been proven to have a crucial role in the development of children’s language abilities in both pinyin language system(such as English)and non-pinyin language system(such as Chinese).The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of musical training on EFL children’s Chinese and English phonological awareness.A total of 214 kids from grade 5 and 6 of an elementary school in Fuzhou completed a music learning questionnaire and then were separated into two groups: those with music training and those without.Both groups took English phonological awareness tests of syllable counting,onset discrimination,rime discrimination,phoneme deletion and stress recognition as well as Chinese phonological awareness tests of syllable deletion,initials discrimination,finals discrimination and tones discrimination.The results showed that musical training had an impact on both English and Chinese phonological awareness.Students with musical training experience performed better in both Chinese and English phonological awareness tasks,except for syllable awareness.Longer musical training experience enhanced children’s both Chinese and English phonological awareness.Children who had received musical instrument training performed better than those who had vocal training in both Chinese and English phonological awareness tests.The present result that personal musical training affected bilingual phonological awareness provides experimental supports to the link between music and phonological processing and a wider picture on the contributing factors of bilingual phonological awareness development.Pedagogically,this study can inspire Chinese parents and schools with the significance and application of musical training in children’s bilingual learning.Parents should pay attention to the early musical training of students and enrich their musical experience;schools could properly arrange some systematic learning of music content in the curriculum to improve students’ phonological awareness and promote students’ phonological learning.In addition,it provides a new idea for phonological teaching,that is,teachers can rely on music to help students improve phonological awareness.