Echoes of Creativity: Investigating the Impact of Music Type on Prewriting Idea Generation

Abstract

Music has been found to be an effective aid in foreign language learning, but its
potential use has yet to be explored. This study utilised a quantitative research
method to examine the effect of music type on generating English-as-a-foreignlanguage (EFL) students’ pre-writing ideas, which were moderated by gender.
Fifty-three students from three classes without academic writing experiences were
assigned to three different music types, including no music, instrumental music,
and pop music. The results showed that female students outperformed male
students, regardless of music types, in pre-writing idea generation tasks. In
particular, female students significantly performed the best in instrumental music,
followed by no music and pop music. On the contrary, male students obtained the
greatest achievement in task when listening to pop music and the lowest
performance when listening to instrumental music. The findings of the study imply
the recognition of gender-specific preferences in using different types of music to
enhance the processes of pre-writing idea generation, prompting tailored writing
environments for EFL students’ needs.