Impact of Music Therapy Measures to Boost up Reading Skills among School Children with Cochlear Implants

Bachground and Aim: The sense of hearing is an important sense that helps the development of speech and language and cognitive skills. One of the oral manifestations is reading which is based on the spoken language. Reading is an important skill to learn lessons for children and the auditory defects or any sensory impairment can limit learning and experience in a way that auditory defects in hard-of-hearing children affects their thought, imagination, and perception. There is a direct correlation between reading ability and level of hearing loss and the greater the hearing loss, the weaker the reading ability and comprehension.The present study aimed to assess the efficacy of music therapy on increasing the ability to read in primary school children who had cochlear implants.

An experimental study with pretest-posttest and control group was conducted. The sample consisted of children aged 8 to 10 years old with the hearing disorder who had cochlear implant surgery selected using convenience sampling method. Data was collected using a reading disorder test designed by Dr. Mostafa Tabrizi, which can be administered within three minutes and in which the words read and the number of mistakes are checked in a list and disorder is diagnosed.

According to the findings, it can be stated that music therapy improves reading skills in school children with cochlear implant.

As a rule, the reading process is a very important tool for students to learn and is used as a means to extend the capabilities of the student during the learning process. Variance analysis of repeated measures showed that music therapy can significantly influence reading skills in primary school children with the cochlear.