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Edutopia
Borrowing a Literacy Strategy From Band Class
A band teacher explains how a process he uses to train budding
musicians’ inner voice can be used to help struggling readers improve.
By Brian Campbell
February 11, 2020
In band class, we don’t spend a lot of time on passages of text, but
you might be surprised by how much our rehearsals focus on reading
skills. Students are learning a set of symbols we convert to sounds to
convey meaning—it’s literacy in a different language.
Reading in band has an additional hitch: Students have to read their
parts while hearing several other parts at the same time, which
requires them to be strong, independent readers—and sheds light on a
common weakness in beginners that occurs in the reading of text as well.
Struggling readers who are native English speakers are very familiar
with their language, and many of them have used that familiarity to
develop coping mechanisms and shortcuts that get them through reading,
to a point. When a student starts band, however, the language is often
entirely new. Coping mechanisms don’t really work—instead they reveal a
student’s weaknesses in reading music.
While these can take many forms, the most common weakness in my
beginners has been in a skill that, in music, we call audiation.
Audiation is, in part, the skill we use to mentally picture what a
passage of music on the page sounds like. In literacy, a similar term
is subvocalization. With my students, I use the term inner voice.
At its core, reading is basically an auditory process that happens to
have some visual steps. We don’t get meaning from text—we get it from
words, and to our brains, words are sounds. Our inner voice is the
bridge between sight and sound. It also bridges sound and meaning, not
just decoding the words but adding elements like fluidity and
inflection. Just as we had to practice with our outer voice to develop
clear speech, our inner voice requires modeling and experience.
SIGNS OF A WEAK OR ABSENT INNER VOICE
As students build this skill, there are telltale signs when it is underdeveloped. In the band classroom, those signs include:
looking away from the page while playing (relying on memory or outside cues)
needing to hear how a passage goes before trying to play it,
getting lost when hearing different parts or others’ mistakes,
mixing up similar spots in the music, and
playing the same spot differently each time.
The same problems can show up when students read text. Teachers should be on the lookout for students:
looking at others, or the teacher, for cues when reading or reciting aloud,
reading without inflection, or ignoring punctuation completely,
skipping or replacing minor words like for, of, a or an, etc.,
replacing words with those of similar “shape” (strength/straighten, every/very, etc.), and
reading a word correctly in a familiar passage but differently in a new context.
Many of these signs mimic issues that students with vision problems
have, so it’s a good idea to check for those, too. In either case, the
student is trying to read with incomplete information and is filling in
the gaps with cues, memory, or guesses.
BUILDING THE INNER VOICE
With young readers, a lot of what we do is aimed at developing the
quality and “volume” of the inner voice. Here are some of the methods
and mantras I use with my band students that may also help students who
need more practice with reading text.
Read, reread, and re-reread: As soon as we begin reading music, I work
with students to establish a clear, dependable process that I refer to
as “the steps.”
First, we read a passage through, focusing on the notes (names and
fingerings) until there are no pauses or hitches. Then, we count and
clap just the rhythms. Next, we pair the counting with the fingerings,
to combine what we’ve learned from the first two steps, and then check
for expressive markings that indicate style or volume, and incorporate
those into the counting.
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