I received some cool questions about chanting:
- Is the chant a part of the script?
- Where does it originate – with a student or the teacher?
- What is its purpose – to reinforce a grammatical structure?
- Do you have an example of a story with a chant?
I said:
I know that if I speak correctly to my students in ways that are interesting and comprehensible to them they will learn the language. Chants magnify that process.
Chants just happen. They express the joy or other emotion that we may feel in a certain moment of a story. I feel that chants originate from the suggested rhythms of certain emotionally charged word patterns that may arise in the story.
It is the nature of language to want to become a song, as all living things aspire to higher forms of expression. Language lets me know it wants this in a cellular way, by sending messages to my body. I feel the need to chant in my body. Some line in a story sends me a message that it can be chanted, and all I have to do is:
- listen to and act on the message.
- resist the urge to quit on the chant because of fear of looking foolish. I’ll fly my freak flag and if somebody doesn’t get me than so what?
So when I am in the FLOW of a story, and some (usually short) sentence comes into the play with a certain unidentifiable quality, I pay attention to it – it can be seized upon and repeated. Once I sense IN MY BODY that a certain phrase can be given the spotlight in this way, I simply point to the focus of the chant (usually an actor) and start chanting. The kids then join in because they can’t help it – it gets in their bodies too. And if they don’t who cares?
There is power in chanting. It is a high form of language acquisition. Or we could cut off the impulse when it occurs. I guess it’s up to us.