Examining the effect of music education on the foreing language receptive skill levels of primary school children

This research has been done for the purpose of investigating the effects of regular music education and musical skills and on listening and reading skills, which are called "receptive" skills in the foreign language learning process, by comparing second grade students who regularly take theoretical and applied music lessons at the school borders since the beginning of 1st grade, and the primary school students of the same age and grade level who have not received any musical education at the school boundaries. With this purpose, a listening & comprehention test which included the vocabulary and grammar acquisitions in the three units of the Course Book that both branches use for learning English as a foreign language has been applied to the 12 primary second grade students who have been selected to the Turkey's first Turkish Music Primary School (Çamlıca Palet Turkish Music Primary School) and received regular theoretical and practical music lessons by the Ministry of Culture Istanbul State Turkish Music Research and Application Community artists and other 12 students from another branch of Palet Schools (Tepeüstü Palet Montessori Primary School) who have not received any musical education; also a Parent Interview Form has been applied to the students' parents fill out to determine whether in addition to musical talent and systematic music education, other independent variables had any effect on the receptive skills in the foreign language learning process. The data of the study were analysed with Non-Parametric Mann Whitney-U Test and Non-Parametric Spearman Brown Corelation Analysis on SPSS programme. According to the findings of the research, for control and experimental group students' receptive skill levels in the process of foreign language learning were found as significant difference in favor of experiment group.