Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004

THE TWELVE SENSES

Henk van Oort, Netherlands

(editorial note: Henk's work and thought has been nurtured by Steinerian thinking)

The following text is meant for all teachers and for teachers of foreign languages in particular.

We may define the senses as windows to the world. Windows through which the individuality looks into the world and through which the world enters the soul of that individuality at the same time. These so-called windows are of great importance to the teachers who, necessarily, try to instil some knowledge through these welcome apertures. Only when the teacher has a clear understanding of these windows, will he be able to reach his goal. The teacher should know how the various windows, or senses, work. For a start: how many senses are there? Apart from the obvious ones, like eyesight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste, I would like to discuss some more unusual ones. All in all I would like to come up with twelve senses:

UPPER SENSES

the 'I' sense
sense of thinking
sense of speech
sense of hearing

MIDDLE SENSES

sense of smell
sense of taste
eyesight
sense of warmth

LOWER SENSES

sense of touch
sense of life
sense of self-movement
sense of balance

Let's start with a brief discussion of the UPPER SENSES. When we start teaching a foreign language, the student will hear the foreign sounds in the first place. With his SENSE OF HEARING he will consciously be listening to the new words. I say 'consciously' because we all know that we sometimes don't really hear the sounds that are present in a room, e.g. the ticking of a clock. Only when the clock stops, we realize that we must have heard the sound all the time, but we didn't notice. Our consciousness has to transform the sound waves in such a way that we realize the sound is there. When listening to sounds and noise we may suddenly realize that we hear a language, whether we understand the language or not. With our SENSE OF SPEECH we detect a meaningful system which we call 'language'. A baby initially isolates from this meaningful multitude of sounds loose words. In doing this, it gradually conquers the language.

As soon as the sounds are heard and identified as a language, the SENSE OF THINKING, or the concept sense, comes into play. With this sense we can delete the language that hits upon our ears. Only after this deleting process do ideas, notions, concepts, unfold themselves from a language into our thinking when somebody is speaking to us. In other words: we have to delete the word 'dog' or in French 'chien' or in German 'Hund' or in Dutch 'hond' in order to get to the concept of that particular animal. This concept lives in a totally silent world where language as such is lacking. We have arrived in the world where also the 'I', our individuality, is to be found.

To complete this first series of the four upper senses I mention the 'I' SENSE. Through this sense we are able to perceive the 'I' of another person. When we try to look somebody else straight into the eyes, we notice that this is impossible. Instead we very quickly move our eyes from the left eye to the right eye of the person we are looking at. Thus we try to get to know who this person really is.

The sequence discussed above takes place in a split second, thousands times a day. The entanglement above is only important if we like to analyse this process for teaching purposes.

Let's turn to the LOWER SENSES and start discussing the SENSE OF TOUCH. When we move our body in the external world we may bump against something. Because of this bumping we awake and experience our 'I'. When we touch something we realize that we cannot get any further than just that. We get to know our boundaries. Very young children have to really learn these boundaries. In the beginning they often run into things because they don't yet know the physical world. This sense teaches us how much space we have in which we can freely move and where the physical world begins. Spatial orientation starts with this sense. Once I heard a fishmonger give a good example of his sense of touch. He told me that he was rather successful in filleting fish because he 'felt' the point of his knife in his hand. His sense of touch was cast as an invisible net around the knife and thus he could 'feel' the point apparently. The sense of touch works very delicately.

The SENSE OF LIFE is a kind of touch, not of the outside, but of the inside world. With this sense we can know how our body feels. When we are tired or ill we know that something must be wrong. We all should listen to our sense of life in a careful and efficient way in order to keep body and soul together and not get really sick.

When we take our consciousness one more step further inwards we arrive at the SENSE OF SELF-MOVEMENT. With the sense of self-movement we awaken to the movements of our own body and to the position of the body at a certain moment. When we hold our hand behind our back we still know whether it is flat or clenched into a fist. When we want to take a glass of water from a table, we know what movement the hand makes. The movement 'makes sense'.

Our consciousness may again be taken one step further inwards. With the SENSE OF BALANCE we have a complete overview of the position of our body. The sense of self-movement and the sense of balance together form the so-called postural system. With this system we create around ourselves a space in which we are fully awake and in which we withdraw the body from gravity. Thus we get the opportunity to have a well-balanced attitude, not only physically, but also psychologically. Well-balanced thoughts can arise from our consciousness. Only if we can properly stand, we can properly understand.

The four middle senses, though of equal importance in a general way, are not extensively discussed in this article because they play a less conspicuous role in teaching a foreign language.

Far more important in teaching is the metamorphosis of the activities of the LOWER SENSES into the activities of the UPPER SENSES. In the process of growing up the very young child is extremely busy developing the proper use of the lower senses. It is literally a process of falling and standing up, of finding the right balance, of getting to know gravity, of exploring one's boundaries, of getting to know the possibilities and the impossibilities of one's own body. After a couple of years the child has come to know the situation and has mastered many physical skills, unless there are developmental problems, of course. When conscious energy is no more needed to walk, to stand up, etc. this conscious energy is freed so to say and can be employed for learning. In other words:

When higher levels of the brain are forced to enter into action in order to maintain posture, learning possibilities decrease. The formative forces at work on the body during the first seven years have not been freed from their organic task in order to become usable for thinking and imagination. Specialised help is needed in such a case.

And then, to finish this text on the senses, I would like to point out that we as teachers must try to direct the newly acquired foreign language to subconscious levels. That means to the levels of the four lower senses. We can do this by walking (rhythmically or not), clapping, stamping, singing and walking at the same time ( singing rounds walking in circles e.g.), doing finger plays, etc. with our students while we are teaching a foreign language. Only then will a complete metamorphosis take place from the lower senses to the activities of the upper senses. This metamorphosis was the basis of mastering our native language when young and will be the basis of mastering a foreign language at a later stage.

Henk van Oort MA