Dancing Through the Alphabet
摘要
Dancing through the Alphabet is a dance and English teaching method aimed at children’s and students’ kinaesthetic literacy development, interplaying with their English speech and written language development. The starting point being dance, several dances described in the teaching creative dance chapters reoccur. The underlying idea is that dance as such can ‘teach’ language, pointing at the linguistic of the instructions and how these are danced. The teaching-as-pointing capacity is reinforced by drawing the dancers’ attention to specific language content inherent to the dance instructions. In meta-talks following the dances, speech and writing aspects are highlighted, verbalised and formalised in idiomatic and grammar rules. Dancing through the Alphabet is a joyful, interactive aesthetic teaching method practiced with thousands of children in preschool, elementary school and after-school activities, in inclusive education and in introductory classes for newly immigrated children and adolescents.