Is choral reading effective?

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woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Thu Oct 07, 2004 1:46 am

Chanting remains useful if done for 5 minutes in the middle of the sports-field after a game of basketball, or on top of a mountain during a nature ramble.

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Lorikeet
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Post by Lorikeet » Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:04 am

I wouldn't classify what I do as "chanting." To me that conjures up a picture of mindless repetition without paying any attention to the rhythm and linking of words, which is what I try to have them become aware of.

woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Thu Oct 07, 2004 3:14 am

Again though, is that so important? When I chant in a foreign language class, I feel that the purpose is to absorb the rhythm and intonation so that I do not have to think about it.

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Lorikeet
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Post by Lorikeet » Thu Oct 07, 2004 3:57 am

Actually I use it more as an assist to listening than pronunciation (in my mind at least--who knows how each individual student uses it.)

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Post by LarryLatham » Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:36 pm

Nevertheless, woodcutter is raising a valuable question, and we must not brush him off. Time is a precious commodity in the classroom, and if we are to be professional in our approach to teaching, we must always question whether the things we do there are "worth it", in terms of efficiency. Otherwise, we run the risk of spending the time we have with students frivolously.

So woodcutter has brought us back to the original question: "Is choral reading effective?" This question does not ask if we, individually, use it. It does not ask how we might variously employ it. It is asking why we use it if we do; what justification we have for using it. That is always a good question, and one which we had better know the answer to for everything we do in the classroom.

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Post by lolwhites » Thu Oct 07, 2004 8:13 pm

So let's take the question at face value. Is it effective? I find it effective at helping students to acquire more natural sounding rhythm when they speak instead of pronouncing every word individually in a robot-like fashion. Furthermore, it wouldn't be effective in isolation - that's why I move on from choral to individual repetition fairly quickly.

Then again, I accept that I teach in the UK, my students are studying English full time and I have 15 hours a week to teach them. If I were teaching them for a couple of hours a week and at the end of the year they were going to sit a written exam with no oral component, I'd have to adopt other strategies.

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Post by LarryLatham » Fri Oct 08, 2004 12:44 am

Excellent point, lolwhites. It looks like we will not be able to answer this question as if one-size-fits-all. Each teacher actively working with students will have to evaluate the question individually, according to the situation (s)he is in. What works for lolwhites may not for woodcutter or Roger or Lorikeet.

But I also want to follow up, lolwhites, on the first statement you made in the post just above. In the interest of genuinely good practice, I'm going to challenge you (in a friendly way, of course :) ). You have merely said that choral work is effective "at helping students to acquire more natural sounding rhythm..." All well and good, but this doesn't go far enough. What evidence do you have that acquiring a 'natural sounding rhythm' (whatever that is) is essential or even important for students to be spending their class time on? To say that a given activity helps students to do something, without expressly defending the importance of that something to a language learner isn't sufficient. :wink:

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Post by lolwhites » Fri Oct 08, 2004 8:42 am

Good question.
As someone who teaches in the UK many of my students come having already spent a lot of time being taught (though not always learning) English at school and one area that often appears to have been overlooked is pronunciation. In my view, good pronunciation (including rhythm) are important for the following reasons:

1) Comprehensibility. Realistically, I won't eliminate all traces of a foreign accent but some students accents are so strong I can't make them out. Teachers who work in one country may well develop an ear for the local accent but I can't, and most native English speakers certainly can't. Putting the stresses in the wrong place can render an utterance totally incomprehensible to a listener who isn't used to hearing it. It can be very tiring for a listener to make out someone's speech when their accent is very strong; I want my students to make a good impression when they speak.

2) The better the pronunciation, the less likely a layman is to pick up on other mistakes. When someone says "you speak good English" they often mean "your pronunciation is good". I've been congratulated for my excellent Turkish, Greek and swedish when actually my vocab is very limited; what I do have is good pronunciation.

3) In class, it's often something they haven't done before, so I can maintain their interest. I won't do that if I just go over the same old grammar points they did back home.

This isn't an exhaustive list and I'll get back to you if I think of any more.

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Post by LarryLatham » Fri Oct 08, 2004 8:50 am

Better! 8)

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woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Fri Oct 08, 2004 11:11 am

From choral to individual repetition?! :shock:

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Post by Stephen Jones » Fri Oct 08, 2004 3:06 pm

In English we are trained to pick up the stressed syllables. Tney have even done studies where missed out the unstressed syllables altogether and still found the sentences comprehensible.

When somebody gets the rhythm right we say he has a good accent, even thugh is articulation of the phonemes may be defective (non Usasian teachers normally refer to this phenomenum as "having an American accent") :) On the other hand we always notice the English accent of a French speaker because, French having no stress, he clearly articulates every syllable, and thus sounds hopelessly foreign.

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TGIF!!!

Post by revel » Fri Oct 08, 2004 5:00 pm

Hey all!

Just got through my first week back at work, am still alive, and even have enough brain power left to makes some comments here! Yay!

I had originally passed on reading this thread because of its title. Choral reading, to me, sounded like the Chinese experience that is described herein. Ho, hum, certainly nothing I would spend my valuable class time doing.

lorikeets and I think exactly the same way about the teaching of pronunciation, even use the same teacher words in class (liaison, for example, and reduction), so I haven't got to add to her excellent comments.

Larry's description of his colleague made me wonder for a moment if he and I had ever worked together, until he noted that that teacher was old enough to be a student's father, and though I'm mature, I'm not quite to that point if the student is past their mid-twenties! Anyway, the technique he describes is one that pops up in my classes often, when I am just sick and tired of what Steven explains in his last post as the monotonous way in which the French (and the Spanish) tend to orally produce utterances in English because of L1 rhythmic and intonational interference. Sometimes I really have to exaggerate for them to get the point! (see "Interpretative ESL" any of you who haven't yet...hehe).

lolwhites makes an interesting point about comprehending, though my experience is a bit the opposite, the native might understand the non-native saying things "poorly", but the non-native saying things word-for-word sure misses a lot when faced with the reduced and liaisoned spoken language of the native. (I've given an example elsewhere, so won't repeat myself here). In any case, her point must be taken into consideration no matter which is confused by whom.

The choral work in my class is limited to songs, which are naturally easy to do as a chorus. The only place I imagine choral speaking is in church, or maybe in a Taliban elementary school, but I don't see it as an economic use of class time. Of course, if you have three hours a day five days a week with the same students, you might use choral speaking to fill in a quarter of an hour, but even then, as I said at the outset, ho-hum, causes, at times, severe discipline problems in all age groups.

I also do not use repetition except when teaching a particular intonation or the words of a song. Repetition is too passive for my liking, if the student has a good ear he/she might be able to mimic whatever the teacher has spit out, but that does not mean that the student will be able to produce the same on his/her own (of course, if there are hours of repetition of the same thing, in the end, all students learn to say "My name is...." and "I am X years old.")

I prefer choral work to be those good old manipulative exercises of substitution and transformation. The time spent on changing affirmations to negatives or sentences to questions or present to past depends on the age group. In the case of school-aged children, we do an exercise once or twice so that they see how to practice it at home, and then they are expected to practice in that fashion at home and come back and perform for the teacher. In the case of adults, who (generally) never study outside of class, we do spend a bit more time in drill-like, choral practice, because they need it and they simply won't find the time to do it. Sometimes it occupies the entire class, but never at the cost of moving ahead and covering the multiple objectives often entailed at a, say, pre-intermediate level.

Well, that's all I had to say, I guess. Thanks for reading, bit long, but I've been writing so short of essays these days, felt like being my ususal verbose self anew! :P

peace,
revel.

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Post by coffeedecafe » Sun Oct 10, 2004 7:25 am

another place where choral could be helpful is the geometric approach to learning. the more points of memory you can establish the more lines and angles and planes and tangents of deduction can be put into play. but it is by no means the only or best method if used alone.
i suppose if a teacher does not want to fall into the trap of being too sympathetic to an accent that the average[l1] person would not understand, the teacher could purposely move from being a very intense listener to becoming increasingly deaf if the purpose was clearly communicated to the student. one thing i have noticed is the student realizing a neccessary word of their sentence is not being understood will have a natural impulse to just repeat the word louder, instead of attempting other options
in another matter, rote learning will be far quicker for the person who must learn a tour guides story, or in the favorite story of a relative about an immigrant newly from netherlands living in the us without knowing english. he wanted to know how to order food at the local restaurant and was taught the phrase "apple pie and coffee". soon he was tired of the same old thing, so he had his friends teach him another choice. they taught him "ham sandwich". so he tried it, but the waitress asked him if he wanted that on white, whole wheat or rye? not properly trained, he got stuck with apple pie and coffee. you can take that illustration whichever direction you like.

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