It is hard to stand up because I get so stiff when I sit down.

by John F. Fanselow

Every time I find it painful to stand up after a meal either at home or a restaurant, I remember the title of this blog, which is a comment one of my aunts used to make every time she moved from a sitting to a standing position.

About 25 years ago, while I was living in New York I began to feel a lot of back pain after I sat a long time or walked a lot. I mentioned this to a friend who was a professional piano player.  She said that she had begun to experience a lot of back pain a few years earlier both during her practice and when she was performing. A fellow musician suggested she visit a practitioner of The Alexander Technique.

I am now living in Japan so when I remembered how my back pain decreased when I worked to change the habits of how I stood, sat and walked in New York, The Alexander Technique did not come immediately to mind as a way to alleviate my pain. But out of the blue one of my wife’s graduate students who is a nurse mentioned in a conversation that her sister was an Alexander Technique practitioner!

We called her immediately and I have now had two sessions with her. Though it has been 25 years since I last had a session, after both sessions I felt as if I was re-living the sessions 25 years ago in New York.

I will not tax your mind with loads of a lot of details about what the Alexander Technique is about, just a few details. Frederick Alexander was an actor who was born in Australia in 1869. As a young man he was frustrated because though he could speak with no problems with friends, when he stood on a stage to recite Shakespeare he lost his voice. He decided to compare his posture when he spoke with friends and when he was on stage to recite Shakespeare. He noticed great differences between how he stood and moved in both settings.

Over time, he was able to overcome his loss of voice by standing on stage the same way he stood when he was chatting with friends.

You can find many more details about his life and his technique on the Internet. I just want to point out one lesson that I have been reminded of and learned in the two sessions I have just experienced in Japan.

In Japan, the chairs I sit in at our dining room table are about 4 inches/12 centimeters lower than the ones I sit on in New York. This means that when I sit in a chair in Japan my legs between my knees and my pelvis are pointing up rather than parallel with the floor. This puts a great deal of strain on my legs and back.

I have now put a 4-inch/12 centimeter pad on the chair I sit in when I eat. I can now sit down and stand up without putting my hands on the arms of the chair to ease me into either a sitting or standing position.

I had lunch with a person 25 years younger than I am last week in our apartment—American like me. He is the same height as I am. When he sat down I noticed that he braced himself on the arms of one of our dining room chairs. And when he stood up he propped himself up putting his hands on the arms of the chairs.  His habits were the same as mine and just as detrimental to the long-term negative effects on our bodies.

I am excited by the Alexander Technique not only because I have found it beneficial to the way I sit, walk, stand and lie down but also because I think that Alexander has lessons for teachers that are in line with what I have been advocating for many years. I am not promoting the Alexander Technique for you to deal with your back pain, though I think it will alleviate it. Rather I am promoting Alexander’s ideas because they are in tune with what I have been advocating for decades to better understand our teaching.

1. Most of what we do is out of consciousness—I call this following rules and Alexander calls it following habits.

2. To change how we teach or sit or stand, we need to observe in minute detail a minute or two of our behaviors. Then we have to change one of our behaviors slightly. If we sit on a chair that is too low for us so that our legs between our knees and pelvis are pointing upward rather than parallel with the floor, we need to put something on the chair seat so our legs are parallel with the floor.

If students use erasers during dictations so that you cannot see what words they wrote incorrectly you have to ask them to put their erasers in their pencil cases so that you can see what they wrote and how it is similar and different from what you said.

Small changes and no judgments! Alexander used the word “habits” because he had no interest in judging people about having bad posture or bad habits of sitting or walking. He just wanted people to learn awareness of how if they sat or stood or walked one way or another there would be different consequence. Ditto my long-term call to be descriptive and analytical rather than judgmental. The rules or habits we follow are inculcated in us through years. To make even small changes — something both Alexander and I advocate — requires that we are non-judgmental.　- John F. Fanselow

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Instant groove lesson recipe

By Erika Osváth

If someone asked me to jump in and teach a stand-by lesson to a group of children, teenagers or adults, a group of any age, I’d just walk in now with no pen, no paper, no book nor laptop and be somewhat sure we could come up with something fun and useful together. Something that I would certainly enjoy and hope they would like too. A lesson full of vocabulary practice, functional language, pronunciation, lots of speaking and listening and possibly some reading and writing too, age of the students and time permitting. And I’m sure some of you know already that one of my instant lesson ideas is to make a rap song together with the group.

I love rapping with my classes and this activity always seems to work, even in my teacher training sessions. So one day I got really curious to find out why this was and ended up looking into some uses of rhyme and rhythm over the history of the humankind in education. In my quest I stumbled upon Alexander de Villedieu, a French teacher and poet in the 12th century whose Doctrinale Puerorum, the book of Latin grammar put into rhyming and rhythmic verses, made it possible for literacy to become widespread well before the age of the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg two and a half centuries later. It was the power of the rhymes and rhythms that was so catching and appealing to everybody that they memorised the rules in no time, then were able to use these rules to work out and understand Latin text. Simply amazing!

After all the history and theory I felt I needed to stop with my search and started to notice that everything around me takes its own rhythm: from the tweeting of the birds in the spring to the silence that surrounds me, from the shape of the sunbeams in the morning sunrise to the colour of my daughters’ eyes.

Everything has its own rhythm and all we can and should do is to notice it and let it come out. “If you can walk you can dance, if you can talk you can sing” says a lovely proverb from Zimbabwe.

So here’s why I think rhymes and the rhythm of a rap song are such powerful teaching tools, even in the EFL classroom. Make sure you do the task I’m asking you at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH06lmV-vDE&list=UUbxUWEsv94uwmkqaniQyiTw&index=7

Did you write down the key words? If you managed to spot them, you have half of the recipe of making a rap song ready.

So here’s the universal rap recipe:

1. Step into the room and notice how everything and everybody are: the weather, how many of your students are looking out the window or gossiping, the quality of the light, everything that is part of that moment. This would help you tune in with your students and together find the topic that interests them the most in that very minute. So let’s say our topic of this moment is: spring or summer? (lower level)

2. Elicit a few words, expressions, or collocations around the topic of their interest, reformulate, upgrade and write the language on the board. Say in this case: windy, hot, rainy, etc. With the new ones you can play some games to reinforce meaning and use. This would also include work on stressed syllables, for example through humming a word/expression to them and asking students to guess it, followed by the same activity done in pairs.

3. The above would be a good way to sensitise students to the rhythm of these key words and then to get them ready to stand up and add the rhythm with their bodies, too. So at this stage choose three to four words to make a vocabulary chant or rap with them with movement. The easiest rhythm pattern you can use for this purpose is a four-beat rhythm, which then you can vary as you wish depending on whether you use three or four key words. For three words, you could use the following pattern:

1, 2, 3, X (clap) windy, hot, rainy, clap
1. 2. 3, X (clap) windy, hot, rainy, clap
1, 2, 1, 2 windy, hot, windy, hot
1. 2. 3, X (clap) windy, hot, rainy, clap

4. Then put together put some language around the vocabulary, some chunks that would occur naturally when talking about this topic, eg., to create authentic speech. For example:

Is it really summer? Where has spring gone?
It’s rainy and windy, and terribly hot.
I wonder why this is, and I’m listening to the birds.
They just keep tweeting and like it a lot.
(I just made this up based on my moment)

5. Finally, read it out to them with the four-beat pattern and ask them to mark the stressed words/syllables – see above. Then get them to stand up, chant it together, dance along and enjoy the rhythm. If you have a tune to play it makes it even more fun. Here’s a collection I found suitable for my classes.

Enjoy the groove! – Erika Osváth

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For Sale: baby shoes, never worn

By Kevin Stein

Every story we read is an act of creation. The words on the page only tell us so much; it is our own hopes, our own fears, and our own memories of summer afternoons that illuminate the spaces which the stories leave dark. It is the nature of stories to be incomplete. And it is this incompleteness that can make stories so difficult for our students to enjoy.

At the end of last year, one of my students came to me with a list of phrases that she was having trouble understanding. They all came from the O. Henry story “A Ramble in Aphasia.” Like most O. Henry short stories, “A Ramble in Aphasia” has a knife twist of an ending. As I helped my student tease out the meaning of the phrases, she suddenly stopped and said, “He never lost his memory!” She grew silent, looked down at the book in front of her, and then looked up at me and said, “He is a real jerk!”

When we give our students a story, we are asking them to not only read, but to create. As they struggle to grasp the words on the page, it’s not surprising that sometimes they might confuse moments of not-understanding-what-is-written with moments of not-knowing-because-something-is-specifically-being-left-out.  When I use short stories in my language classes, it’s my job to help students tell the difference and see those moments of not knowing for what they are, a chance to create meaning by working with the text.

I find that dramatic readings can help students recognize when they are being asked to bring something personal to a particular part of a story.  Dramatic readings aren’t full-fledged plays, but are more kinesthetic than just reading out loud.  In a dramatic reading activity, a story is split up and parceled out, each member of the group given responsibility for a different section of the text.  Sometimes students break the text up by characters and than assign one or more students to play the role of narrator.  Sometimes they simply divvy the text up by paragraphs.  The students remain in their chairs and read the story out loud.  As they practice reading the text three or four times, they begin to fill the words with the hues of emotion, just as they begin to fill the air around them with hand gestures small and large.  They also begin to invest themselves into the parts of the story which had, perhaps only a little earlier, seemed empty of meaning.

The title of this post, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn,” is often attributed to Earnest Hemingway and has been called the shortest novel in the English language. It’s a fine example of how plot — the points of a story a writer chooses to explicitly reveal to a reader — and story — everything that a reader and a text need to bring together to make meaning — can be very different things. The activity of time-lining a story can help students get more comfortable with the story/plot gap. First have students read a story. Then have them identify all the main events in the story and write them down on a blank time line. That is just the first step of the exercise. The real work comes in helping students include those parts of the story which have been left out. A time line of the plot points only of “baby shoes” would look something like this:

But how would your time-line of the full story look? What events would you chose to make explicit that are only hinted at in those six words. There’s a lot of space in this haiku of a novel. I doubt two people would fill it up in exactly the same way. For our students to enjoy reading a story, they might, at first, need help identifying just where those spaces exist. But once they do know, they can start to share how they fill in those spaces, and doing that is one of the great joys of talking about literature.

I believe that teaching my students how to ask for directions, answer a phone, write a resume, or draft a simple business letter are all important parts of my job. These skills will help my students survive day-to-day when they go to study abroad or find themselves in a situation where they need to use English on a regular basis. So I can understand why some teachers might be hesitant to use stories, especially difficult literary stories, in a language classroom. We only have a limited amount of classroom time and learning how to set a date for a business meeting probably seems more important that discussing why Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” is so creepy. But I would argue that this focus on the practical surface can obscure the underlying linguistic needs of our students.

All communicative interactions require us to deal with ambiguity. All texts, whether a business letter or a conversation with a friend, require us, at times, to read between the lines. And working with stories gives our students a chance to do exactly that.  Great stories are filled with moments of silence. They are like the real world, rife with spaces waiting to be filled. When our students work with great stories, they are practicing one of the most important second language skills of all, how to take responsibility for not only understanding, but the act of meaning making when using the receptive skills. And without the awareness and courage build your own meaning in the dark corners of a text, no story, whether it be the simple recounting of a day or the laying out of an intricate five-year business plan, is ever truly complete.

A complete list of free O. Henry texts from Project Gutenburg is available here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/634?sort_order=title

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