Music education of children with dyslexia

Abstract

Dyslexia, as a most common learning disorder, might have negative consequences on children’s abilities not only in general education, but also in music acquisition. Not only it might affect their notation literacy, sight-reading skills and orientation in the music sheet, but also it might impact other functions, such as visual, aural, and motor skills. Moreover, it could manifest itself also as disorder of the dynamic psychical processes in form of hyper- or hypo-activity, or it could create integration difficulties resulting in an inability to synchronize the heard sound with the seen note. Teachers should be aware of the primary and secondary symptoms of this disability in order to be able to implement the most suitable strategy so as to facilitate the childґs learning. Some of these strategies include using various colors, enlarging the staff, practicing differentiation skills and eye movement control, focusing first on rhythm, taking advantage of other childґs skills (sensory and motor memory, imagination etc.). Many children with dyslexia are musically gifted, but due to lack of understanding and support from the teacher, they experience frustration which leads them to dropout from music school. On the other hand, many diagnosed musicians claim that dyslexia did not affect any of their music abilities (many times besides the sight-reading). We find it necessary to conduct more research in this area, to be able to scientifically grasp the impact of dyslexia on music education, to exactly diagnose the level of this impact, and to suggest effective strategies to facilitate childґs learning