Reciting poetry: The role of rhythm in grammatical structure

Have you ever wondered about the relationship between poetry and music? People often ask me why reciting poetry seems to help children, particularly those finding aspects of reading fluency and comprehension somewhat challenging.

Practising poetry by heart in group teaching is a rich, experiential form of learning. The feeling of the sounds in the movement of the face, the jaw and the tongue are dance-like sequences and can be enjoyed for their bold sensations. 

When a writer portrays to vivid effect the mood or the atmosphere of a poem, the colourful tones and timbres of the words are musical in every way. In terms of breathing life into these sensations, reciting poetry is very much like playing a composition on a musical instrument. Indeed practising poetry through the congruence of movement, sounds and patterns is a deep and enriched form of language learning that we all can enjoy, having mastered this art first as young infants as we acquired our home language (Nazzi et al., 1998).

If you read or recite Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky aloud, it’s easy to evoke the atmosphere and moods created by movement, rhythm and sound, even though the made-up words of the poem are quite meaningless. Behind the expressive effect of the nonsense words, there’s a robust rhythmical structure and it is fascinating that neuroscientists have found that indeed, we do respond to the grammatical structure of this poem (Bonhage et al., 2015). The importance of rhythmic patterns is that they cast beams of expectation, helping to guide and focus our attention, enabling us to fully anticipate and enjoy all the more, the likely flow of the sounds and the colourful moods of a poem. 

Rhyme, which is so popular in children’s literature, is useful in that it offers a playful and supportive structure, for the accessible and minimal requirements of the text. Hearing the rhyming feature in words offers children a massive anchor, particularly for those who may arrive at school struggling to discern word boundaries in a stream of speech. Here is an example of rhyme from, ‘One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, with kind permission from Dr Seuss (1960):

This one has a little star. This one has a little car. Say! What a lot of fish there are.

Rhyming words are invaluable for those children who come to school with a good grasp of language. Rhymes require children to focus their attention in a future-oriented way - as they predict the place of the rhyming word ‘in time’, at the end of a line or phrase. We can think of this as a form of attention training for children because each time a child anticipates a rhyming word at the end of a line, they are galvanizing their attention span and also aligning with the rhythmic and grammatical structures of language. 

This is just one reason why it is not surprising that children who are very sensitive to rhythm are more likely to become good readers (Tierney and Kraus, 2013). They not only arrive at school already able to anticipate and enjoy the structure of rhythmic patterns in language, but they are also able to detect the boundaries of syllables and to perceive the unique timbral features at the onset (front edge) of every phoneme. 

Children who may require a reading intervention thrive when practising poetry because the explicit rhythmic structure and the regular phrase lengths support their somewhat fragile attention, helping them to perceive the meaningful elements of language with greater ease.

In the Rhythm for Reading programme, we takes this principle further still, by providing rhythm-based reading tasks that give children a chance to build sensitivity to rhythmic patterns. 

The programme immerses the children in rhythmic structures. They build a strong response to rhythmic patterns, develop and sustain their attention span as it is challenged by increasingly complex musical phrases. The children’s sensitivity to rhythm transfers into their reading development after only a few ten-minute sessions.

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REFERENCES

Bonhage, Corinna E., et al. (2015) “Combined eye tracking and fMRI reveals neural basis of linguistic predictions during sentence comprehension.” Cortex 68, 33-45

Dr Seuss (1960) One fish two fish red fish blue fish, Random House

Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J. and Mehler, J. (1998). Language discrimination by newborns: Towards an understanding of the role of rhythm, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24, 756-766

Tierney A, Kraus N (2013) Music training for the development of reading skills. Prog Brain Res 207:209 –241