Altay Eren

The Effects of Music on Reading Comprehension:: Let the Music Play or Not? Altay Eren

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of listening to music while reading on reading comprehension performance. The participants of this study were made up of 129 eighth grade students. The study was modeled by the randomized posttest-only control group design. A Music Appreciation Test and A Reading Comprehension Test, originally developed by the researcher, were used to determine the students? music preferences and reading comprehension performance, respectively. The results showed that the reading comprehension performance of the students who read the passage with their non-favored non-verbal music, non-favored verbal music, and favored verbal music were significantly poorer than those students who did not listen music while reading the same passage. Importantly, the current results also demonstrated that the reading comprehension performance of the students who listened to their favored instrumental music while reading did not considerably differ from the reading comprehension performance of those who did not listen to music.