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Is there such a thing as the art of speaking? Oh yes! I can mumble my way through when I speak, slurring my words and droppin’ the endin’s of words, and barely making eye contact, and I think you will agree that I am still speaking, but I am not speaking well. I’m not communicating as well as I could if I used better speaking practices. The art of speaking well is something we can all grow in, and it is part of the collection of skills that we call language arts.
So how can we help our students to grow in the art of speaking well? Through everyday conversations, of course. But also through a method called recitation.
We’ve been talking about language arts and how we can help our students to grow in the four areas of using language well: hearing, speaking, reading, and writing. If you’ve missed the previous posts, check out the link to see those posts. Today we want to focus on how we can use recitation to help our students grow in the art of speaking well.
Recitation is simply reciting, or speaking aloud, something that you have memorized. In the Charlotte Mason approach, recitation is built around ideas, not just dry facts. So we don’t assign a student to memorize a list of names and dates or words and definitions, we give them Scripture and poetry to memorize and recite. Bible verses and poems are filled with ideas that feed the mind. Recitation is not just an exercise to train the mind; it is an outflowing of the ideas that the student has taken in, pondered over, and allowed to settle into her heart and mind—there to influence her thinking and behaving. That’s the power of an idea.
Recitation is not just an exercise to train the mind; it is an outflowing of the ideas that the student has taken in.
Charlotte Mason believed that recitation was good preparation for public speaking. If you think about it, there are really two things that concern a person who is asked to speak in public: (1) What am I going to say? and (2) How do I handle all of those eyes looking at me? Recitation removes that first obstacle—What am I going to say?—because you’ve memorized what you’re going to say. That leaves only the eyes to deal with.
Recitation also gives our students practice in sharing ideas verbally. Now, some of our students don’t seem to have a problem with sharing their ideas verbally in everyday life. It might be difficult to get a word in edgewise. But others need that gentle encouragement to speak up because people want to hear what they have to say. Recitation can be a bridge for those students. In recitation, again, they don’t have to spend a lot of energy and brain power thinking of what to say. They can communicate someone else’s ideas contained in the Scripture or the poem and just practice the skills of speaking well. As they grow in those skills and begin to feel more comfortable sharing ideas aloud, they can more easily transition to sharing their own ideas aloud too. (Narration offers that opportunity. We’ll talk about narration in another post.)
The first step in recitation is, of course, to memorize the Bible passage or the poem that the student will be reciting. One word of caution: we don’t want to steal the joy out of the piece by using drill-and-kill methods of memorization. Even in the memorizing, we need to allow our students space to form their own relations, to allow the living ideas of the passage to spark more ideas in our students’ minds. A simple way to do this is to read the passage or poem all the way through once a day or once or twice a week, and do that reading aloud. We’re working toward communicating the piece through the spoken word, so hearing it spoken is a vital part of the process. Our Scripture Memory System is set up on this principle. If your student can’t read the passage or the poem on his own yet, you can read it aloud for him. As your student reads or listens, encourage him to give full attention and, as time goes by, to join in on the parts that he knows. If he is reading the piece for himself, he can gradually say the parts that he knows without looking. That simple focused touch just once or twice a week or once a day (if you want to learn it faster) will keep the words and their ideas before your student but not beat them to death.
As your student is memorizing, you can also discuss the ideas that are contained in the passage or poem. We have some wonderful collections of poems for students of all ages, gathered by individual poet, so your students can get to know each poet well and gain a better understanding of his or her style. Remember, recitation is about communicating someone else’s ideas. So we want to encourage our students to think about what that poet or author was trying to convey and how the person reciting can communicate that intent faithfully. It can be helpful for the student to hear good examples of reciting that particular piece, but we need to be very careful that we don’t inadvertently urge our students to mimic a particular model. Recitation is a very personal activity. Done correctly, it gives the listeners a glimpse into which ideas from the piece nestled most deeply in the reciter’s mind and heart and what relations he formed with that passage for himself.
On a very practical level, we can also take the opportunity to coach our students to grow in their enunciation. Obviously, we don’t want to drill and kill in this area either. But we can listen for habitual patterns that we can then encourage our students to work on; such as pronouncing final consonants, conquering difficult words, projecting accurately to make sure everyone in the room can hear at a comfortable level, regulating the speed at which the words flow. All of those skills, and more, can be gently approached and practiced as we give our students beautiful words and ideas and then coach them as they determine how to communicate beautiful words in a beautiful way.
All of that is included in the simple method we call recitation. The method requires less than five minutes once a day, or just once or twice a week, but it can give your student valuable growth in the art of speaking well.
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