Sharareh Sarsarabi - Islamic Azad University, Khorasan Razavi, Neyshabur, Iran
Mahmood Yousefi - Islamic Azad University, Khorasan Razavi, Neyshabur, Iran

The present research aimed to investigate the effect of background music on reading comprehension performance of the students. In this study, the researcher s focused not only on the relationshipbetween music and reading but also on the effects of music on extroverts – introverts personality dimensions. The main question this study tried to answer was whether using music as a background might enhance students reading scores. To answer the questions, 32 students from ShokoohInstitution of Mashhad, participated in this study. They were selected out of 40 students, employingNelson proficiency test and were randomly assigned to two groups. Before distributing the tests, Fog index was calculated to determine the readability of the texts. The texts were at intermediate level.The participants in experimental group were asked to read three texts accompanying by musicbackground, but the subjects in the control group were asked to read the same texts without background music during three sessions. To see if there is a significant difference between the readingscores of the two groups, Independent Samples t-test was run. Statistical analysis was applied for theeffect size, Mauchly s Test of Sphericity and one-way repeated measure ANOVA. At the end, Pearson correlation coefficient showed the relationship between scores of students’ performance and scores of introversion- extroversion scale. The results indicated that there was a significant difference betweenthe reading scores of the music group and the non-music group and the experimental group outperformed the control group on the reading comprehension.

Background music - Classical music – Extroversion – Introversion –– Reading comprehension