Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 5; September 03

Moving like they do

Level: beginner to advanced

Use lesson A if you are teaching a monolingual class who are living in their home environment. Use Lesson B if working with a multinational class in an English speaking country.

Lesson A

Preparation: choose three, two minute video clips with people moving and talking.

In class

• Explain that you are going to teach your students the well-known drama technique of body mirroring. Ask one student to help you demonstrate the first exercise. Stand in front of the group with the student close behind you. Move one of your arms in many patterns and ask the student to imitate your movements exactly. Pair the students and ask them to do the same, following their partner.

• Demonstrate the second exercise with another volunteer. Stand facing the partner and move your arms, while holding their gaze. The volunteer exactly mirrors your movements. Tell the students that when watching good mirroring it is hard to make out who is leading and who is following. Ask them to work with a new partner and again mirror their partner exactly.

• Play the first video clip, sound off, and ask the students to focus their attention on the movements. They should choose to follow the movements of one of the people on the screen. Play the clip twice more and ask the students to stay still, but to feel their bodies mirroring what the people on screen are doing. They mirror mentally, rather than physically. Play the clip twice more, this time with sound, and the students do full physical mirroring.

• Ask the students to comment on how their bodies and minds felt about "becoming" target culture people

• Repeat the above procedure with your other two video clips.

Comment: this is a very useful exercise to do just before a class visit to a country where English is the native language.

Lesson B

Preparation: none

• Do steps 1 and 2, the mirroring exercises, as in Lesson A.

• Explain to the students that one way of fully understanding a culture is to feel its typical movements and rhythm in your own body. For homework, ask people to follow people in the street at a discreet distance, and to take on their walk, paying attention to posture and to hip, knee and ankle movement. Ask them to do this for two or three minutes each with three people of the same sex and then three people of the other sex.

  Ask them to write notes on how the six different walks felt inside their bodies.

In the second lesson :

• Ask various students to demonstrate various walks that impressed them. and explain how they felt in the walking rhythm of the other culture. Ask them to tell the class what these walks teach them about the other culture.

Comment on lessons A and B

This way of approaching a foreign culture comes very naturally to very kinaesthetic students and for people who learn best by doing. It is less comfortable for people who prefer to stay dissassociated, who learn best by observing from the distance. Possibly the latter gain more insights than the former.

Acknowledgement: Iole Vitti, from Brasil, taught us this cultural application of mirroring, which she uses as the golden gate into any culture she does not know.