Gryende musikkliteracy : unge instrumentalelevers tilegnelse av musikkliteracy i lys av sosiokognitiv teori om læring
Doctoral thesis
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Date
2012Metadata
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Abstract
The research question addressed in this thesis was: How do beginners on a music instrument acquire music literacy in a music studio setting? The study was designed to identify and describe the learning strategies of 8-9 year old music school students by observing and interviewing them during their first year of instrumental lessons. The study of music literacy acquisition is in this thesis based on a sociocognitive view on literacy as a learning process, where knowledge acquisition is regarded as constructed, and learning seen as active meaning-making processes. In this perspective music literacy acquisition entails the ways the learner comprehends and learns both the culture, the ways of expressing meaning, how to use cultural tools, and the ways that the symbols are written and decoded. Four cases were chosen as an empirical base for the investigation: two trombone students and two flute students. I observed the students for a period of nine months, and interviewed them twice during their first year of instrumental lessons. The observations and interviews focused on learning strategies and literacy events. The data was transcribed and analysed using the computer based program NVivo, and a taxonomy of strategies was constructed in close dialog between the strategies that emerged from the empirical material, and strategy categories derived from research literature in language and music research. The study shows that the four students differed to a large degree in their use of strategies, both when it came to what strategies they used, and how many strategies they used. These differences were relatively consistent throughout the year. The strategies the students used were characterised by the meaning making attempts they did when they tried to make sense of both the sociocultural setting and the musical symbol system. They formed temporary perceptions of how the written music was to be understood and used. These were reconsidered by the students, adjusted, and negotiated along the way. The young learners didn’t seem to be uncomfortable with this temporary knowledge. The main strategy categories observed in the material were social strategies, cognitive strategies, memory related strategies, support strategies and listening strategies. Several of the students used support strategies to compensate for the lack of memory related strategies and cognitive strategies in their approaches to music literacy acquisition. Another aspect of the emergent literacy seen in this study is the multimodal ways that the children seem to approach a new symbol system. They expressed their meaning making through speech, gestures, songs, invented symbols, writings, language narratives, sounds and pictures. The study also showed that it is not enough for the teacher to tell the student what strategies that could be used; they have to be tried out and practised in order to be internalized as tools of learning. Teachers’ knowledge of how their students learn to comprehend written music will potentially affect students’ learning processes. This study illuminates this kind of knowledge through observations of beginner student’s behaviour, actions, and their thoughts of their own learning.
Description
Avhandling (Ph.D.) - Norges musikkhøgskole, 2012