The Effects of Iranian Traditional Music on EFLStudents’ Reading Comprehension and Translation

The present research aimed at observing the effects of Iranian traditional background music on translation process as well as reading comprehension. To this aim, ۲۱ students of Translation Studies at Narjes University of Rafsanjan were studied. They read and translated three different journalistic texts at the same level of difficulty in three different sessions. In the first session, they did the task by listening to Iranian traditional music with lyrics, in the second session, they listened to the Iranian traditional music without lyrics and in the last session they did the task in a quiet environment. In order to do this quantitative research, a translation quality assessment proposed by Hubscher-Davidson was applied. The study findings indicated that students exposed to instrumental background music performed significantly better on the reading comprehension test while the best translation scores belonged to a quiet environment case.

Keywords:

Iranian traditional music , Vocal , Instrumental , Reading comprehension , Translation