Thanks for all your excellent suggestions. In South Australia I used music as a focus for literacy which was meant to make classes more appealing and motivating to young people.
One of the activities was following along with the words on sheet music. It forced the students to read quite quickly and, although the words were written from left to right, their eyes needed to jump down the page more than the usual amount of space. It was a new sensation that made them comment.
I did a lot of reading about accelerated learning that may be a memorising aid that Andrew mentioned and left and right brain activity, rhyming, etc. The evidence all seemed to be anecdotal but there was certainly that appeal for young people to bring in and share their music, write about it, research it and so forth. My presentation topic was Learning Along the Lines of Music at the ACAL conference in Melbourne. That attracted some interest from teachers, too! Debbie