Attention or Autopilot? Motor Learning and the Choral Warm-Up (original) (raw)

Choral Practice-the Neurophysiological Opportunist's Way

xombi.inter.hu

If you say "choral practice" to an experienced language teacher, you will get a mixture of a frown and an embarrassed laughter in return. "We left that decades ago", some will say. However, several neurophysiological and neuropsychological processes in the central auditory mechanism indicate that in fact choral practice should be very effective. Extensive classroom experience underpins this view. Therefore, this paper will put forth ten good arguments for choral practice based on a synthesis of neuroscientific research, speech acquisition research, and 30+ years of teaching experience. It will also proffer a detailed, well-tried methodology for the secondlanguage classroom, viz. the present author's personal approach. This approach, in a nutshell, involves listening and speaking exercises with a great multitude of chorus repetitions of whole phrases with a constant focus on prosody and with immediate, uncritically praising but constructive feedback by the teacher after each repetition. It is hoped that more colleagues will try choral practice, and that some of you will have the time and other resources to perform scientific classroom research. If, as the present author believes, this centuries-old method can be proven effective also with "hard" data, it should no longer be withheld from the millions of second language learners worldwide. Also see companion article "Five Cornerstones for Second-Language Acquisition" in this issue.