Introduction
"Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Look past your thoughts so you may drink the pure nectar of this moment."
-Rumi
Premeditation and spontaneity, mind and body, creation and inspiration. It is the meeting space between these potentially competing or conflicting concepts that interests me as a language teacher. Carving words requires that one indeed has words to carve; the wider your foundation of vocabulary, the more likely that you will be able to express yourself fully and accurately. With premeditation - in the form of preparation and repeated practice - you have an opportunity for logical, careful, indeed mindful creation to occur. You are able to determine the ways in which you prefer to carve your words, to develop a sense of style and an intimate ownership of the language you are learning, so that when the occasion calls and allows for spontaneous and inspired response, you are able to activate your prior experiences in something much like muscle memory, to act through speech with authenticity and ease.
An over-preoccupation with thinking about the right words will, however, hinder the communication process, as one stammers and stumbles through the options, unable to actually choose any of them. You must not though go fully to the other extreme, that of no planning, no thinking, just doing. Putting yourself for a moment in the shoes of your beginning language students, without yet a breadth of linguistic facility at your disposal, you would fall flat, stammering and stumbling now not from awe at the wealth of choices before you, but because there are in fact no choices at your ready. Like all others but the hummingbird to the flower of the trumpet vine, you cannot access Rumi's "nectar of this moment" without the appropriate tools and the knowledge of how to use them. This unit equips students with new tools and practices, those of the persuasive art of rhetoric, to convince themselves as well as others of their fluency. Confident students armed with the right linguistic implements are better prepared to access those moments of pure nectar in the language classroom.
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