Language skills and special knowledge in music.

Facing at least two of the questions raised within the call for papers for the 2014th conference (‘who are we teaching’ and ‘learning opportunities and participation’), the own study focuses on pupil in German secondary schools at age 12 to 14.
Until now there are practically no tests or findings within the German-speaking countries available to measure the special knowledge language in music classes. Though teaching is addressing very diverse students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds there seems to be a desideratum: The pilot study will be carried out in January 2014. It seeks to investigate the use of C-tests on (linguistic) musical knowledge. C-tests are used to investigate general linguistic competences and they are based on the reduction of redundancies by liquidating the second half of words in a defined way. Having six texts derived from a qualitative analysis and aggregation of German schoolbooks and two standardised German texts, data is analysed by using the item-response-theory following the Rasch-model.
The usage of such data then opens up a variety of continuity research projects: Do you need to be a “good reader and speaker” in order to be a “good student”? More precisely: Do these competencies relate to assessment and success in schools? What are the impacts of language skills on special knowledge in music? Are there differences between different school subjects? Are there correlations between special knowledge acquisition, intelligence and competencies such as the reception and classification or analysis of music? Are there comparable findings in other European countries?