Multiple Intelligences in EFL
Exercises for secondary and adult students

Herbert Puchta, Mario Rinvolucri, Helbling Languages, 2005

Introduction

If you want to find out what multiple intelligences are, read Section 1

For a brief outline of the theory of multiple intelligences, read Section 2

If your main question is: "what has this got to do with my teaching?", read Section 3

If you want to grasp the shape of the book, read Section 4

An influential idea in the West, that dominated the 20th century, was that intelligence has two or perhaps three main strands, the logical-mathematical, the linguistic and the spatial. This thinking was institutionalised in the standard intelligence tests * that were used in Western education to include some young people and to exclude others. In UK, for example, a logical-mathematical, linguistic and spatial test, the 11+, was used to separate the "clever" 12 year-olds from the "dummies", so the 20% would go to grammar schools and the rest, the majority, to secondary modern schools. This unhappy, socially divisive system still survives today in the most politically conservative parts of UK. In Chile, in the 1970's, university entrance depended on how well candidates did in Academic Aptitude Tests, which, at a higher level, had a similar focus to the UK's 11 + test. Teachers working in the Chilean university system came to think of a person with a test score of 400 ( OK for humanities) as being dim and 650 ( OK for medicine) as being bright. In those years the dominant, narrow view of intelligence was not only politically and institutionally accepted, it was swallowed whole by many teachers, including Herbert and me.

Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind, ( New York, Basic Books, 1983) came to challenge the limited concept of intelligence outlined above. He proposed that intelligence falls into the following seven areas:

The intrapersonal intelligence

When working in the mode of this intelligence you focus in and function in terms of self-knowledge, self-regulation, self-control. You are exercising your meta-cognitive skills.
In this intelligence the horizon is where the boundaries of self lie. This intelligence has to do with happiness at being on one's own, with joy at knowing oneself, with an awareness of one's own feelings and wishes. An ability to abstract oneself and to daydream is good evidence of the intrapersonal intelligence at work.

The interpersonal intelligence

Gardner|: " The core capacity here is the ability to notice and make distinctions among other individuals " and, in particular, among their moods, temperaments and motivations and intentions. Examined in its most elementary form the interpersonal intelligence entails the capacity of the young child to discriminate among the individuals around him and to detect their various moods. Highly developed forms of this intelligence are to be found in religious and political leaders ( as Mahatma Ghandi) in skilled parents and teachers, and in individuals enrolled in the helping professions, be they therapists, counsellors or shamans" ( op. cit.)

Central to this intelligence is the ability to listen to what the other person seems to be saying, rather than to your distortion of it, to be able to gain good rapport with another person, and to be adept at negotiation and persuasion.

The logicalmathematical intelligence

Einstein, whom his maths teachers berated for day-dreaming in class, wrote this about himself :
" I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialities, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us. In physics, however, I soon learnt to sort out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential. " ( op.cit)

The above paragraph seems a clear example of the logicalmathematical intelligence at work. Einstein uses few words to express large ideas with sharp clarity. This intelligence can be associated with what is called scientific thinking. It often comes into play in the analytical part of problem solving, when we make connections and establish relationships between pieces of information that may seem separate, when we discover patterns and when we are involved in planning, prioritising and systematising.

The linguistic intelligence

" By writing I was existing. …..my pen raced away so fast that often my wrists ached. I would throw the filled notebooks on the floor, I would eventually forget about them, they would disappear…….I wrote in order to write. I didn't regret. Had I been read I would have tried to please. I would have become a wonder again. Being clandestine, I was true…….( op.cit.) Jean Paul Sartre wrote these lines about himself at the age of nine, and in them he describes one aspect of the linguistic intelligence , an intelligence that is intensely concerned with form. His description also evokes the intrapersonal intelligence in which other people are beyond the horizon.

Can we invite you to do a small experiment? Look and internally listen to these sentences and see how much or how little you are intrigued by them:
He's got this brilliant book on the brain
Inattention is quite likely to generate inner tension
I feel that five to one is grossly unfai
r He wrote these lines about himself at the age of nine
Mary looked at John with nothing on

For a person with a strong linguistic intelligence, ambiguity and a tricky relationship between signifier and signified can be exciting. You may chortle over a misprint like univerity for university. However if the logical-mathematical aspect of your mind is dominant at the time of reading you may find this kind of thing trivial or absurd. Logicalmathematical thinking is concerned with the content of sentences while the linguistic state of mind revels in the relationship between form and content.

The musical intelligence

The following lines are taken from the M.I. Bill of Rights that you will find on pageXX and they express what a person with a strong musical intelligence may feel in a modern language class:
I want to find tunes for parts of each unit
I have a right to use my DVD player in the reading and writing parts of the lesson
Can we do more jazz chants?
I want to sing the grammar
I have a right to music that relaxes me
I need music that expresses my mood
I have a right to music to lighten my language work

A person with a well-developed musical intelligence benefits from being in a world of beat, rhythm, tone, pitch, volume and directionality of sound. Fortunately for us language teachers, many of these features are also properly part of our linguistic realm, though we can choose to emphasise them or not. In teaching those students who are strong at music, it makes sense to do so.

The spatial intelligence

Imagine yourself standing outside a large building, a theatre, a swimming pool, mosque or a gym hall you know well. Notice the relationship the building and the space around it.
Shut your eyes. Mentally enter the building, Stand stock still once you are mentally in there and notice what you can hear and how the space you sense around you feels, the temperature and the dryness or dampness of the place. Now mentally open your eyes and look around you. What lines do you notice, what colours, and how is the play of light and dark here and there in the space? ( Gardner presents the spatial intelligence as being principally dependent on our ability to see, yet for some people apprehension of space can be through touch ( is the case of many blind people), it can be through sound ( the bat-like world of echo) and through somatic awareness. Herbert and I maintain that perception of space is multi-sensory, even if the visual aspect, in many people, predominates.) I f you were able to follow the sensory instructions above easily and with pleasure it seems as though your spatial intelligence is functioning well.!
Language uses spatial thinking when it describes time and other concepts in terms of space: within three days in the space of two hours…
as long as you….
beyond the pale
under no circumstances

It is arguable that space is the main metaphor area "wired into" language to explain a wide range of basic concepts. You would expect air-traffic controllers, architects, landscape gardeners, civil engineers and sculptors to have highly developed spatial awareness as is clearly the case with Henry Moore:
" He thinks of the sculpture, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand; he mentally visualises a complete form from all around itself; he knows, while he looks at one side, what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realises its volume, the space that the shape displaces in the air." ( op.cit.)

The kinaestheticbodily intelligence

Did you ever see an Arab horseman on his mount, when man and beast look like one animal? The rider is in total harmony with his horse.
Did you ever see a ten year old perform an Aikiodo "katta" of 50 to 60 movements with crisp precision, smooth flow and not a single hesitation?
Gardner suggests that:
" Characteristic of this intelligence is the ability to use one's body in highly differentiated and skilled ways , for expressive as well as goal-directed purposes: these we see as Marcel Marceau, the mime, pretends to run, climb or prop up a heavy suitcase. Characteristic as well is the capacity to work skillfully with objects, both those that involve the fine motor movements of one's fingers and hands and those that exploit gross motor movements of the body." ( op.cit.)

Two "candidate" intelligences

Since the 1983 appearance of Frames of Mind, Gardner has gone on to propose two more possible intelligences, the natural intelligence and the existential/spiritual intelligence. The first of these two has to do with being in harmony with nature in the way that many early peoples were and are. Perhaps you have friends who know what should be done next in a garden and then go and quietly do it? A half instinctive half knowledge-based awareness of when to water, when not to water, when to manure, when to weed and when to leave undisturbed….. all of these have to do with the natural intelligence.
When St Teresa of Avila writes:
" I live without living in myself
And I die because I do not die" she expresses something of the existential or spiritual intelligence. This intelligence has to do with perception of what is beyond, what is higher what is greater than us. Maybe you have friends who go into certain spaces and sense something that they find hard to pin down and put into words. I have such a friend who resonates and is filled with something ineffable each time she enters certain churches.

When you reflect on the wealth of thinking experience evoked in the last three pages, standard, reductionist intelligence tests seem grossly inadequate. Yet in most places they still hold political and institutional sway. This book hopes to take its very small place in the struggle to get the many intelligences valued in society and in school. In this book we focus on our mutual area of special interest: the language classroom.

1 .Brain damage may isolate a given intelligence and spare it, while destroying elsewhere.
We can speak of an intelligence being independent of other parts of the thinking apparatus if a stroke or an accident can knock out other parts of the brain-mind and leave it relatively intact. Independent existence of an intelligence can also be demonstrated if one intelligence's neural infrastructure is destroyed, leaving the rest of the brain unharmed. For example, damage to the motor cortex of the brain may leave a person paralysed, thus knocking out their capacity to express their body-kinaesthetic intelligence, while leaving the rest of the brain's thinking neurology still functioning.

2 Each intelligence may well have its prodigies and/or "idiots savants"
An "idiot savant" is a person who is precocious in one area but an idiot in everything else. The existence of such people shows that a given intelligence can operate at a high level and independently from the others.
In a case described by Lorna Selfe in her book Nadia, a case of extraordinary drawing ability in an autistic child, we see a child with a highly developed spatial intelligence but a severe inability to be with other people, a serious deficit in her interpersonal intelligence. Nadia started drawing horses when she was three and a half, horses that looked like the work of a teenage artist. " She had a sense of space, an ability to depict appearances and shadows and a sense of perspective such as the most gifted child might develop at three times her age."

Bruno Bettelheim describes the case of Joey, the "mechanical Boy" whose one interest was in machines; he took them apart and put them together again and actually wanted to become a machine. When he came in for a meal he lay down an imaginary wire and connected himself to his source of electrical power. Joey lived entirely in his brilliant, kinaesthetic world of machines but had come to work with Bettelheim because he was under-developed in every other area.

The case of Christopher, a linguistic idiot savant, is of particular interest, as it shows both the workings and the limitations of the language intelligence. On as variety of logicalmathematical tests Christopher scored between 40 and 75 ( where the average score is 100) . At the age of 20 his ability to draw people was about that of a six-year-old. Tests also showed that he had little notion of what was going on inside other people's minds: he and a five year-old were shown one of her dolls hidden under a cushion of a settee. The girl was led out of the room and the doll was now hidden behind a curtain. When Christopher was asked where she was likely to look for the doll he suggested she would choose the new hiding place.
In the language area, however, Christopher was prodigiously able. He had some knowledge of and skill in using these tongues:
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Modern Greek
Hindi
Italian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
and Welsh

He could learn from any source, a teach-yourself-book, a grammar book, a native informant etc…

He was happy with word games in any language he knew. When he was asked to take the German word REGENSCHIRM ( umbrella) and produce as many words in German as he could using the letters of the original word he came up with these:
MEIN ( my)
SCHNEE ( snow)
REGEN ( rain)
ICH ( I)
SCHIRM ( screen, shelter, cover)

Christopher's case, documented in The Mind of a Savant, Neil Smith and Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1995, is particularly interesting in showing how limited the language intelligence is on its own, without any power in other thought areas. The boy was given an English text to translate into three other languages . He did the task fast and "linguistically" well, while completely failing to notice that the original was sy

3 An intelligence will have a core set of operations

These core operations will be triggered by stimuli coming in from outside, or arising within at a certain point in a person's development. An example of this would be the initial sensitivity to pitch relations, given that dealing with pitch is one of the core functions of the musical intelligence. Another example of a core operation would be the ability to imitate body movement , one of the kinaesthetic intelligence core operations.

4. An intelligence will have a developmental process or history

The intelligence will develop in identifiable steps as the person goes from womb existence to adulthood. There may well be critical periods during which development speeds up. If the appropriate stimuli are absent during such periods, then development may be stunted.

5. An intelligence will tend to be encodable in a symbolic system

Drawing serves as a notational system for the spatial intelligence. Music can be written on the page and has given rise to several notational systems. Language is principally a code, a primary oral one and a secondary written one. ( Sign language is a kinaesthetic -visual code) Mathematics has whole sets of symbolic systems embodying it. Ballet scenarii can be symbolically represented on the page which is an encoding of one aspect of the bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence. Of the seven intelligences Gardner put forward in his 1983 book ( op.cit.) only the intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences are beyond the scope of any attempt to encode in a symbolic system.

Though the above list of criteria for an intelligence is not a complete one, enough has been said to give some idea of how Gardner defines " an intelligence". As neurology invents better tools for tracking what is physically going on in the brain we are likely to get more evidence about how each intelligence functions chemically and electrically.

Though it is useful for analytical clarity to speak separately of different intelligences, in daily life we frequently use several intelligences simultaneously. When a person opens their personal diary to write about a meeting they had with a colleague, they are typically alone in the room and writing to themselves. Their diary is a form of inner monologue exteriorised onto paper and their intrapersonal intelligence is in play. As they write they may speculate about the meeting from the other person's point of view which engages their interpersonal intelligence. As the expression of all this is through language they are clearly also exercising their linguistic intelligence.
We feel it is actually rare for a person to be involved exclusively in the exercise of only one of their intelligences.

Good teachers are usually enthusiastic about their subject. However, they often find their students don't share their enthusiasm. For example it has been said that only one out of five language teachers were good at maths when they were at school themselves as pupils. . If you were in the other four fifths, even if you were lucky enough to have had an enthusiastic, inspiring teacher this may not have been enough to make the subject comprehensible and attractive to you. Yet, had those who were poor at maths had a teacher like Mark Wahl to make it attainable and available to people who were weak logically mathematically but who were rich in other intelligences, then maybe the subject would have opened to them. Here is what Wahl says in his book, Math for Humans, about the way he helped a visually spatially intelligent second grade girl to take her first steps towards coping with arithmetic:
" I asked her to make a picture incorporating 8+7=15 and to do this on a large index card
I asked her to paint four more cards with other math facts on them. When she came back each card was a painting in which could be discerned the symbols of a math equation creating the outline of trees, person, beach towels etc…I looked at her first card and asked her:
'How much is 8+7?'
Silence. Then I said:
'It's the beach scene,' and she immediately said: '15'

She ended with a deck of artistic flash cards that soon created answer associations for her without my having to provide scene clues. My logicalmathematical intelligence could never figure out how her mind did this, but there was no need to - she was successful with her facts and her math performance too off , thanks to her spatial intelligence."

This teacher had sufficient respect for the girl's strengths beyond and outside mathematical thinking to teach her in a way that helped her, in the long run, make sense of the maths problems he set her. He drew her into her logicalmathematical intelligence via her spatial ability.
We feel that you can work just as Wahl did, if you are prepared to systematically involve other intelligence areas in your language lessons. If you do this you can expect enrichment in a number of areas:

- Your students' motivation partly depends on how "addressed" they feel in your class and on how meaningful they think the activities in your class are to them. If your teaching focus is on the linguistic domain only, you will get excellent results with the minority of students who are strong in this area. If, however, you regularly use exercises like the ones suggested in this book, you will notice that students whose strengths lie in areas other than the linguistic one will activate themselves more and will develop an interest in your subject and want to find out more about it.

- Generally speaking we tend to regard as intelligent those students who show a high degree of linguistic ability and therefore share the intelligence that language teachers are strong in. If the focus of your teaching is mainly on the activation of the language intelligence, students whose strong areas are elsewhere may easily be seen by you as inactive, stupid and demotivated. Using activities that draw on a variety of intelligences will help you to better appreciate the otherwise hidden strengths of these students. Consequently they will feel more appreciated by you and will feel better about what they achieve in the foreign language class.

- Although you can never predict what kind of thought process a certain activity will trigger in your students' minds, it is safe to claim that using activities like the ones in this book is likely to activate a wider range of intelligences than if you taught language purely "linguistically". As students gradually realise that they can approach language from their strength areas they will feel better in the language class and may become more willing to take risks and begin to develop areas that are not "their own". You may begin to find it is possible to involve students in discussion of perceived cognitive weaknesses and strengths, thus contributing to the students' meta-cognitive awareness, the thinking about their own thinking, which is a useful step in mental development.

Let us now show you an example of teaching a language area multi-intelligently. The topic of the lesson was punctuation and the target group were 13 years olds. The teacher split them into groups of six and gave each group a different reading passage ( two short paragraphs) . They were given 10 -15 minutes to work on the short texts. In each group a learner read the passage , pausing at each punctuation mark, while the other five made a specific sound and/or did a specific action ( that they had agreed on before) to represent it, eg:

Reader: The girl looked down

The group of five snap their fingers in unison once, to represent a comma The group clap their hands once, to represent opening inverted commas

Reader: I love you

The group clap their hands twice to represent closing inverted commas etc…..

This activity helped the children realise that punctuation is more than random salt and pepper on the page and it does this by appealing to the musical, kinaesthetic and interpersonal intelligences. The exercise outlined is much more effective than long teacher explanations about the function of each punctuation mark. ( For more on this exercise see PXX- our first experience of it was at the University of the First Age, in Birmingham, UK, a programme imbued with MI thinking and aimed poor children living in the city's ghettoes.)

Another exercise that focuses on punctuation and appeals to students' interpersonal intelligence is when lower intermediate students are asked to write short letters to each other in role as punctuation marks. Let's s say Laszlo, a Hungarian student, decides to write to Ana, a classmate from Argentina, who he decides to characterise as an exclamation mark. His letter might start start:

Dear !,
I am writing to tell you that I find it amazing that you that you are able to say something so strongly, so clearly, when you speak to other people. No, not… I do not mean your English. I mean the way you express your thoughts, your feelings….

What might seem at first like a rather strange exercise, when done with a warmed up, intermediate class of late teenagers or adults, can have interesting results.
What are students doing as they write such letters? In the first place they are expressing new things about their partner via the metaphor and secondly doing an in-depth exploration of how they understand and use this punctuation mark. ( For a fuller outline of this activity, see Letters, Burbidge et al.,OUP 1996.)

But I guess I've been using multiple intelligences in my teaching for years, we hear you say.

You are right and you are right in at least two distinct ways:

- You have been offering M.I. stimuli to the students. For example, when a teacher gets students doing activities from Drama Techniques in Language Teaching, Maley and Duff, CUP, 1978, such as Hotel Receptionist, in which a volunteer mimes a sentence that the other students have to guess and have to recreate word-for-word accurately, the appeal is equally to the kinaesthetic and linguistic intelligences.
- Quite independently of your intentions, your students have been freely using their intelligences in multiple ways in your classroom. In this sense, your classroom has inevitably been full of MI work.

This book offers you a choice of activities to enable you to invite your students to use their strongest intelligences as well as develop the weaker ones. We wish to stress the fact that the activities offer invitations rather than being mono-directional "single intelligence exercises". Whatever intelligence we invite our students into we can be sure that there will always be people in our class who will instinctively process the invitation in ways different to from the ones we would have predicted they would use. These intriguing differences in the way the human brain works can become stimuli for discussions of individual thinking processes and learning from each other.

To illustrate our point, let's take an activity that many people would reasonably regard as an essentially musical one and let us notice the very varied ways in which students executed the task set.
Here is the activity: the students stand up and spread out around the space available so there is plenty room round them. They shut their eyes. They imagine an orchestra in front of them and they mentally become the conductor. They are asked to lead the orchestra through a three minute snatch of music. If they don't like classical music they can choose to be a band leader a pop star or whatever.

From one class we had this feedback:

I couldn't hear any music but something was vibrating through my body, I was in movement and flow. (kinaesthetic processing)

I just heard music from somewhere up above me … no need to move at all (musical and spatial thinking)

Yes, there was music in the background, but I was really aware of myself, my body and my breathing ( intrapersonal mode and also musical and kinaesthetic)

The violins were the problem… we were rehearsing and I just could not get them to come in at the right time. I don't think they liked me. (interpersonal)

My mind went totally blank… I don't know what I did for those long minutes…

I was in a high mountain valley and there was snow on some of the mountains. I knew I had to get across this torrent but could see no bridge…( visual-spatial).

To get as much as possible out of the activities in the book it well worth you allowing time for the students to tell each other about their inner processes, as happened in the lesson above. The outcomes of the activities may often go beyond the realms of the intelligence areas you have invited your students to work in. Some of their reactions may surprise and delight you.

If you are currently working from coursebooks you might first turn to Chapter 2 . Here you will find exercises designed to fit in with the material in the units you are teaching.
This chapter also floats the sensible idea that you do not need to plod sequentially through the coursebook: there may be a strong case for using exercises that go back to units already worked on and forward to units you will cover in depth in some weeks' time.

You may be teaching the same material through for the second, third etc, time. You may find that, though the students coming fresh to the book are happy with it, you are beginning to have to stifle your yawns! In this situation the activities in Chapter 2 will allow you to brighten up your teaching hours without deviating from the line and content of the textbook.

If you want to achieve a firmer idea of how the intelligences work, turn to Chapter 1 General MI Exercises You might want to read Section 1 of this introduction and then try out a couple of exercises from Chapter 1 with family or friends. You might choose one of these:
The intelligences on holiday P.00
Get to know the group via MI P.00
The MI bill of rights. P.00

In Chapter 3 you have a spread of exercises that invite learners to work in their interpersonal intelligences. These communicative activities are of a sort you are probably familiar with from many Teacher Resource Books.

Chapter 4 offers you exercises that will appeal to the more introspective learners, to the people who sigh a little when asked, yet again, to work in pairs! Here is something for students with a strong intrapersonal need. We feel there has been a lack of such inward focused activities, in which a person is left to work on language without prying, supervision or the demand that they communicate with others. A few unit titles will give you a flavour of Chapter 4:
Imaging
Listening with your mind's eye
Concentration on language
Intrapersonal questionnaires
Inner Grammar Games

The final part of the book, Chapter 5, Self Management, is rather more demanding of you and the students than lesson outlines in the earlier sections. The ideas in this chapter will work best in groups that are well warmed-up and where a reasonable climate of trust has developed.

FUN is central to the whole idea of this book. We agree with rats and with the poet Schiller. It was Schiller who said that you are only human is so far as you can play and you can only play in so far as you are human. Recent research on rats has shown that, after a boring day, rats experience very little memory-consolidating sleep, while after a day in a stimulating environment, they do lots of memory-fixing sleep. Is it necessary to go to experimental neurology or to the giants of German literature to substantiate the claim that fun is central to efficient learning? It seems obvious!

If you would like to share some of your MI experiences in class with other teachers round the world, please write a piece for Humanising Language Teaching, which you will find at: old.hltmag.co.uk

-" The Stanford-Binet intelligence scale is a direct descendant of the Binet Simon scale , the first intelligence scale created in 1905 by Alfred Binet and Theophilus Simon.

……….The Stanford Binet scale tests intelligence across four areas:
verbal reasoning
quantitative reasoning
abstract/visual reasoning
short term memory
The areas are covered by 15 subtests including
Vocabulary
Comprehension
Verbal absurdities
Pattern analysis
Matrices
Paper-folding and cutting
Copying
Quantitative
Number series
Equation building
Memory for sentences
Memory for digits
Memory for objects
Bead memory.

( the above quotation comes from: www.healthatoz.com/healthatoz/Atoz/ency/stanford-binet_intelligence_scales.jsp)

Please check the Teaching English Through Multiple Intelligences course at Pilgrims website.