Research Overview: Language in Music Education
Abstract
RESEARCH OVERVIEW: LANGUAGE IN MUSIC EDUCATION The details outlined below are intended not as a paper but as a summary of the music education aspects of a three-year research project commenced at the Social Psychology Research Unit, University of Kent at Canterbury, England, in January 1982. The project, entitled "Children's Understanding of Everyday Spatial Terms in Musical and Mathematical Contexts: An Experimental and Training Programme", is funded by a major research grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The project is concerned with children's development in the use and understand- ing of multi-meaning terms in musical and mathematical education. In particular, it is concerned with the ways in which children learn (or fail to learn) to use familiar spatial terms such as up, down, higher, lower, above, below, etc., in musical and mathematical contexts. It has been widely-recognised that an early understanding of these everyday terms in their specialised musical and mathematical applications is essential and fundamental to a child's future progress in both these important areas of education. Although children are known to be reasonably proficient with these terms in their everyday spatial usage by the end of the infant school years (Sinha and Walkerdine, 1974; Walkerdine, 1975; Durkin,