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While-Listening activities are activities that are completed by the students when they are listening to a passage. While-listening activities are also called during-listening activities. You needed to do some pre-Listening Tasks in order to prepare your students before this stage of a listening lesson. These activities are followed by post-Listening activities. Sleep Learning Beginner Spanish Lessons! Listen to these basic Spanish phrases while you sleep to learn them quickly. FREE Spanish Cheat Sheet: https://realw.

By: Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

I rush into the library to drop off some books. When I turn around I see students sitting at tables going over their notes and reading their textbooks; studying. It’s that time of the year again: Exam season is underway. I notice that many of them are wearing headphones and I start to wonder: What are they listening to? Their favourite songs, relaxing lounge tunes, or white noise that cancels out disturbing noise from the outside? Does it make a difference at all what they are listening to while studying?

Before reviewing research that has looked into this question, let me first bust a myth about music and human cognitive skills. You have probably heard about the Mozart Effect. If you ask people in the general public about this effect, they will probably say something along the lines: Oh yes, listening to music by Mozart makes you smarter. However, this statement is not only completely false, but is also a misinterpretation of the Mozart Effect. The Mozart Effect is a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata. The finding was reported by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1) in an experiment where they had students listen to Mozart’s piano sonata, to a relaxation music, or to nothing (silence condition) before performing a spatial reasoning task (a subtest from the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale). The researchers found that participants’ performance on the spatial reasoning task improved after they had listened to the Mozart sonata compared to the other conditions. However, there are a couple of points that are important to know:

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1. the effect is extremely short-lived with the positive enhancement in spatial reasoning only lasting for 10-15 minutes,
2. the improvement is restricted to a quite abstract mental rotation task that is only a small part of the equation when assessing intelligence, and
3. other studies were not able to replicate this finding (2).

Taken together, the Mozart Effect has no relevance for educational practice and, unfortunately, listening to Mozart music will not make you smarter.

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Now that this is out of the way, let’s turn to studies that have investigated the effects of background music on learning. One idea why listening to background music while studying or performing a task may be potentially beneficial has been put forward by Schellenberg and colleagues (3) in their arousal-emotion/mood-activationhypothesis. It assumes that music that puts you in a positive mood has a positive effect on your performance. Another idea is the changing state hypothesis, which states that rapidly changing music will distract learning and lead to poor performance (4).