Contributions of music education to the development of competence in linguistic communication in primary education

Abstract

The competency-based curriculum model involves the interaction of all areas of knowledge in order to transfer their learning to different social and educational scenarios. Specifically, in music education, where many contents are worked to be used for the development of the key competence in linguistic communication through the creation of situations based on language as an expressive medium, among others. Thus, this article focuses on assessing the acquisition of this competence after the implementation of a didactic-musical programme in primary school. The participants were 129 students, 69 males (53.5%) and 60 females (46.5%), divided into a control group (63 students, 48.8%) and an experimental group (66 students, 51.2%), who were in the sixth year of primary education in three public and state-subsidised schools in the city of Madrid. For this purpose, an ad hoc programme of musical activities was developed and implemented in the music classroom over the course of an academic year. The results obtained in the post-test phase indicate an improvement in the scores obtained by the experimental group in the areas of linguistic competence in terms of making group presentations, the correct use of verbal and musical language in different contexts, and the selection and organisation of relevant information, which points to the suitability/efficacy of music education for the development of oral expression, written expression, oral comprehension and written comprehension defined by the structural union of both languages.