Are we neglecting our bodily kinesthetically intelligent learners?
Chaz Pugliese, France
Chaz Pugliese is a teacher and teacher trainer associated with Pilgrims, UK, Chaz works out of Paris, France. Apart from MI, Chaz is interested in task design, creativity and motivation, and spoken grammar. E-mail: chazpugliese@gmail.com
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An epiphany
Bodily-kinesthetic intelligences and ELT course books
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3
Conclusions
References
When I became interested in Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences, I decided to keep a logbook. I wanted to keep track of what I was doing with my students at the time, the exercises we were working on, the materials we were using in class. Three months later, when I felt I had collected a substantial amount of data, I looked at this Polaroid snapshot of my teaching at the time, and I remember being horrified when I realized that the tasks I was asking my learners to do reflected my own strengths, NOT theirs. This is, I now see, a fundamental mistake because it was based on the assumption that my learners' strengths matched or were similar to mine. But alas, this is mere wishful thinking, as no two people think and learn alike. MIT is a pluralistic, egalitarian view of intelligence: in brief it posits that we come into the world equipped with the same set of eight or more intelligences but the way we make use of them varies from individual to individual. It's a little as if we didn't have a single language we could use for communication, but rather, eight or more.
I believe the job of a teacher is to facilitate his/her learners' encounter with the subject matter. This is best achieved when someone is asked to learn in ways that make sense to him/her, as opposed to their teacher's. This, clearly, was not happening in my classes when I first got exposed to MI.
Some time ago with a group of colleagues interested in Gardner's theory we looked at a series of mainstream ELT course books that all claimed to cater for the needs of teen-agers and young adults. Our goal was to see which intelligences the activities featured in those books tapped into. After careful analysis, we saw that linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences came in first and second, followed by spatial. Now, this didn't really come as a shock. However, we were all surprised at the scant material that would appeal to people with strong bodily kinesthetic intelligence. After all, it is fairly common sense to assume that teen-agers and young adults crave movement at one point or other! So are we neglecting these types of learners? The aims of this short article is to offer a few exercises that cater for people who process language through their body, as well as through rhythm.
Aim: to teach pronunciation (stress patterns).
Level: any
Material: none
Procedure:
1. Ask your learners to work individually first and write up on the board a list of words: photograph, stereotypical, banana, internet, controversy, etc
2. Point to one of the words on the board and model its pronunciation like so: take one step per syllable, stressed syllable = longest step. E.g. ba NA na
3. Now invite your students to do it with you. Go through all the words with your class until you feel they've got a hang of it.
4. Next, put up on the board a new set of words. Ask your students to work in pairs, link arms and model the pronunciation. (A word of caution: depending on the number of students can be chaotic. This in case you think chaos is a bad thing in the classroom. I happen to like it.)
This is a fun and effective way to teach/revise stress patterns. The idea behind it is that because some people make sense of information received through their bodies, providing them with a kinesthetic hook will help them make input more memorable, and hopefully, facilitate acquisition. In addition, the interesting thing about step 4 is that the students have to negotiate the pronunciation of the items on the board, have to decide where the stress falls, and THEN model it.
Variation 1
Same procedure as above but this time the learners get to work on short bits of language. Here's some I've used with my (French) learners:
You could have fooled ME!
You can say THAT again!
He has a CHIP on his shoulders.
Step ON it.
(It is always interesting to see the learners' reaction when they are told that for the above to make sense they must be pronounced as highlighted.)
Variation 2
The exercise may also be set up as a contest: a pair (or a threesome) models a word for the rest of the class. If correct, they're awarded one point, if not, they don't score any.
The following exercise is a variation of the well known running dictation (Davis-Rinvolucri, CUP 1994). It works with monolingual groups.
Aims: listening, speaking, reading, writing
Materials: a short text, some blue tack or scotch tape.
Levels: elementary upwards
Procedure:
- Choose a text your students will be interested in. You will need threesomes for this exercise. Make as many copies as there are groups and then stick the texts up on the walls.
- Ask the students to work in threes and assign roles: the A's write. Next tell the B's to memorize as much as they can from the text and pass it on to the C's. The C's then relay it to the A's in their L1.
- Halfway through the text, ask your groups to swap roles and carry on from where they left off.
- When the groups have finished, ask them to retranslate the text back into L2.
- When they've completed the translation, hand out the text in English and have them compare.
Rationale: Step 6 is useful in that it makes the learners reflect on their knowledge gaps.
This exercise works well with young learners, but not just!
Aims: This can be used as an icebreaker. The exercise is also useful to help learners release some of the pent-up energy through dancing.
Level: any
Procedure:
- Pair off the learners, assign them roles, and ask them to stand facing each other. Ask the A's to initiate a movement, which the B's have to copy. Model this with a learner.
- After a short while, ask them to swap roles.
- Now play some music, quiet and reflective, and tell the learners to take it in turns to move to the music and to act as mirrors.
- Again, ask the learners to swap roles.
- Finally, have the learners do the same, but this time play some up-tempo music.
In the movie Educating Rita (a loose adaptation of My Fair Lady), Rita, a young hairdresser with barely any schooling, decides to go to school to read the classics. When her tutor invites her to explain why she suddenly wants to go to school, she answers: « there must be better songs out there. I want to sing better songs ».
MI has taught me that songs can be sung in different keys, and that they don't have to come from the teacher's songbook.
Gardner, H. 1992 Frames of Mind. New York, NY: Basic Books
Davis, P. and M. Rinvolucri 1994 Dictation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Please check the Teaching Through MI course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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