How Does Mozart's Music Affect Children's Reading? The Evidence from Learning Anxiety and Reading Rates with e-Books

Some music has been proved effectively to mitigate anxiety, beneficial to reading. However, little was known on its influence of reading behaviors and outcomes. Thanks to the advance of e-book technology, it becomes possible to track reading rate and outcomes in a real-time manner by the underlying mobile devices. This study intends to examine the effects of the Mozart piece K.448 (sonata for two pianos in D major) on the learning anxiety, reading rates and reading comprehension of students for reading e-books. The quasi-experimental design was applied, and 62 senior grade elementary school students participated in this experiment. The results showed that when compared with a silent task (reading without the music), this piece of Mozart’s music had positive effect in reducing learning anxiety, and improving the students’ reading rates, reading comprehension and direct process performance. However, we found that the music had a negative effect on the students’ attention for their interpretation process. We inferred that this Mozart’s music might take part of attention resource. This was supported by the increase of students’ extraneous load while listening to Mozart music, which led to the insufficient concentration in the interpretation and the evaluation of content. Overall, the findings reveal that the use of certain music, such as Mozart K.488, can be a potential tool to enhance reading outcomes when using e-books.