The moment
It is the second hour of the morning and the room is already warm. Forty voices rise together through a times table, loud and flat and fast, and the windowpanes seem to hum with it. A boy at the back moves his lips half a beat behind everyone else. A girl near the window has her eyes on the ceiling fan, her mouth open, no sound coming out. The chant ends with a shout on the last number, and the room breathes out.
Now ask what the second line of yesterday’s poem meant, and watch the noise turn into silence. Is it the sound of learning, or the sound of a room that has learned to sound like it?
Chanting is one of our oldest teaching tools, and it is not the problem. The problem is chanting done badly, when repetition runs ahead of meaning and the voice runs ahead of the breath.
The practice
Begin by choosing a short text worth carrying for life, four to eight lines of a poem, a table or a set of verses. Write it on the board or a chart. Nothing else is needed.
Then say it once yourself, slowly, as if you mean every word. The children only listen. Talk about what it says, and let them show a word or two with their hands, so the meaning arrives before the sound.
Then chant it line by line, with you calling and the class answering, the way call and response works. Keep a pace the children can breathe with. Mark the beat softly with a clap or a tap on the knee. Show them where to take a breath, at the end of each line, so the breath and the words move together. Never ask anyone to hold their breath to finish a line.
Once the class has it, change the colour of the sound. Chant it softly, then in a whisper, then with half the room, then standing. Each change makes the children listen again.
Finally, let a few volunteers say it alone, or let pairs say it to each other. Now you hear who has been hiding inside the group. Never force a child to perform alone, and never let it become a shouting contest, because young voices strain.
It takes five to eight minutes. Do it daily for a week with the same text, then once a week to keep it alive. It works with a whole class or a group of eight to ten.
What to watch for
When it is working, you will see eyes up or on the text, shoulders soft, and the whole room taking breath at the same place. Some children will chant it in the playground unasked. Most telling of all, they can tell you what a line means.
When it is not working, lips move with no sound. Voices get louder and flatter. Speed climbs. Eyes wander. When you see this, stop. Slow down, drop to a whisper, or move to small groups.
A child who refuses to chant can simply listen. Many join after days of hearing the others, and some will keep the beat before they are ready to use their voice. If, over several weeks, a child cannot hold even a short line, speaks very unclearly, or seems not to hear the group, talk to the parents and suggest a hearing or speech check.
Why it works
Chanting together is something bodies do with each other. Kirschner and Tomasello found that four-year-olds who sang and played music together afterwards helped and cooperated with each other more than children who played the same game without music. Pearce, Launay and Dunbar found that adults in new singing classes grew close much faster than those in craft or writing classes, an “ice-breaker” effect. Shared sound is understanding between bodies.
It can also build reading. David Paige studied sixth-grade students who did about sixteen minutes a day of whole-class choral reading and found gains in decoding and oral reading fluency. Timothy Shanahan warns that many children only appear to take part, which is why this practice ends with individual voices.
Repetition also shapes the reciter. Hartzell and his colleagues found marked differences in brain regions for language and memory in Vedic pandits trained from childhood to recite very long texts. This is what Indian thought calls saṃskāra, the impression that repetition leaves behind. But the impression takes the shape of whatever is repeated. So what, exactly, is a child’s body rehearsing when it chants?
Why this works: R51 Rote and recitation: when repetition deepens learning and when it empties it · R40 Rhythm: why children learn through beat and repetition · R41 Voice: speaking, singing and the body of language · R10 Participatory sense-making: how two bodies understand together
Next in Voice and language: P22 Call and response: language through rhythm
Notes
- Kirschner, S., and Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 354–364.
- Pearce, E., Launay, J., and Dunbar, R. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2(10), 150221.
- Paige, D. D. (2011). 16 minutes of “eyes-on-text” can make a difference: whole-class choral reading as an adolescent fluency strategy. Reading Horizons, 51(1).
- Shanahan, T. (2024, 13 June). Choral reading: good idea or not? Shanahan on Literacy, Reading Rockets.
- Hartzell, J. F., Davis, B., Melcher, D., Miceli, G., Jovicich, J., Nath, T., Singh, N. C., and Hasson, U. (2016). Brains of verbal memory specialists show anatomical differences in language, memory and visual systems. NeuroImage, 131, 181–192.
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