Too
much noise in the classroom!
The classrooms in Québec schools are so loud that
children have difficulty understanding their teachers. “It
is especially alarming in the lowest grades, from kindergarten
to grade three,” notes audiologist Michel Picard
who, with his team at Université de Montréal,
has ventured out to a number of schools to measure ambient
noise in the classrooms.
The preliminary results of a sampling done in the spring
of 2002 in three schools on Montréal's south shore
demonstrate that the noise is even more overwhelming than
in schools that were part of studies elsewhere in Canada
and the United States. In a region like Greater Montréal,
from 30% to 45% of the primary schools have been swamped
by urban development,” Mr. Picard notes. This means
that these schools are now located in places where noise
pollution exceeds the acceptable noise level established
by the World Health Organization, 55 decibels.
“
In some cases, the ambient noise is 5 decibels louder than
the human voice. The children have to make a tremendous
effort to grasp the sounds before they can concentrate
on the meaning of the words. The learning process suffers.” Some
schoolchildren took advantage of the researchers' visit
to testify to their plight. We should be worried when young
people, who are accustomed to loud music and Walkmen, complain
about classroom noise and tell us: “Please, do something,
we can't hear our teachers!”
There are two sources of noise, explains the audiologist:
noise produced by whispering and the furniture in the rooms,
and noise that comes from outside the school. Teachers
have a habit of opening the windows to let in the fresh
air from the first nice days of the spring until the fall
period. “We calculated that the school windows were
open for four months during the school year. We aren't
against this, naturally. But we noted that the noise becomes
a lot louder, which is a problem. Are we prepared, as a
society, to sacrifice four months of ideal learning conditions
in a school year that is already short? The answer is obvious.”
A few recently built schools have air-conditioning systems
that eliminate the need to open the windows. But these
systems, which are poorly maintained, of uneven quality,
and sometimes old, are often very loud. One of them produced
a 40 decibel background noise, just 15 decibels below the
human voice. In the study done by Mr. Picard, a school
in Saint-Hubert proved to be especially loud. This school
is located less than two kilometres from a municipal garage,
so that heavy vehicles are always coming and going on a
road that passes about ten metres from the building. “The
irony is that this garage was built long after the school;
so it was obvious that the noise would bother the children.”
Researcher: Michel Picard
Telephone: (514) 343-7617
Email: michel.picard@umontreal.ca
Funding: Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network
