Cheeks, Chin, Chest

In one of my undergrad French classes, the professor took me to task for my minor mispronunciation of the words for sweater and chicken. The latter, une poule, employs a full, round "oo" sound, with a hint of a w at the end, much like the American word for a game of billiards. The former, un pull, since it lacks the o-u combination, must be a tighter "oo" sound. He described the latter as "saying an e sound, but with your lips in the oo form." Even as my fluency progressed and I expressed more and more complex ideas in written French, I could never hear or produce any difference in those two sounds.

This humiliating experience, as it turns out, was excellent training for teaching ESOL.

In Thursday's class at ASIA, Inc., we focused on parts of the body. This is always a nice, concrete lesson that students respond well to. And it's valuable, basic information they need for talking to doctors and understanding safety precautions in a job setting. Besides, one's body is ground zero for experiencing and understanding the universe, so naming its parts in the predominant language of a culture is a fundamental component of becoming a full member of that society.

Using myself as the first model, I took the class through a list of head-to-toe vocabulary.

"What is this?" I asked, pointing to my head.

"Head," several students said, after a brief pause and a few blank stares. I wrote head on the white board, saying each letter aloud.

"How many heads do I have?" I like to include the spelling of numbers in this exercise because it not only seems logical, but it reinforces sight words that are impossible to sound out phonetically, like one and two.

We continued downward through the body: eyes, nose, ears, shoulders, stomach, back, legs, etc. Once all the vocabulary was on the white board, I handed out copies of a page from the textbook. It was a drawing of a woman's face next to that of a man's body standing in profile, both with numbered, blank lines pointing to various body parts to be labeled. I got them started with eyes, then let them work on their own. Lots of Nepali conversation buzzed as they scrutinized the list of words on the white board and helped each other figure out what each line was pointing to. I circled the table slowly, periodically correcting a mislabeled or misspelled item.

After a while, I noticed that everyone was mislabeling cheek and chin, sometimes wildly so. Sanji had a cheek labeled as "shoulder;" Lindu had it marked as "foot." Everyone simple left the line for "chest" blank. How had they gone so terribly astray? I talked a couple of individuals through the corrections, but when I came back around to them, I noticed that they had mislabeled the same cheek again. 

Clearly, some linguistic confusion was brewing.

When most of the students had the majority of the body parts labeled, and time was slipping toward our lunch break, I erased the board and called for everyone's attention. I wrote cheek on the board.

"What word is this?"

A few students said "chin" softly, while others said "cheek." One or two said nothing.

"C-h-e-e-k," I said, indicating each letter with my finger. "Cheek. Where are your cheeks?"

A few pointed to their chins, and a few pointed to their cheeks. One pointed to his chest. When I had gone around to help individuals, I had employed a lot of touching to indicate what was what. For cheek, I had gently pinched Asha's or Kamala's cheek; for chin, I had lightly scratched Lindu's thin, gray beard.

In front of the entire class, I took both my cheeks in my hands and wagged them out and in while saying the word cheeks, so my lips bounced together, giving the word a vibrating, cartoonish cadence. 

They all laughed, then pinched their own cheeks in the same way.

"Everyone stand up!" I thought getting them on their feet would energize them and add some physicality to the exercise, maybe reinforce the vocabulary with muscle memory. I wrote chin under cheek on the board, and chest under that.

"Chee-ee-ee-ks," I said slowly, flapping the flesh of my face with my hands. The entire class mimicked me.

"Chi-i-i-n," I said, just as slowly, holding the lump of my chin between thumb and forefinger. They mimicked me again.

"Che-e-est," I said, thumping my chest with the palm of my right hand. More mimicking.

This was, honestly, the first time I had ever fully realized how very similar the sounds of these three words are. I guess I learned this vocabulary when I was very young, when the sounds of English seemed self-evident, before I had heard any other language or questioned the arbitrariness of linguistic memes. These three vowel sounds are as close as beet-bit-bet; no wonder my Southeast Asian students had difficulty differentiating them.

We repeated our vocalization and physicality of cheek-chin-chest several more times in unison, speeding up a little with each repetition. In the middle of this, Chandra—the very kind and patient man whose office door opens directly onto our classroom—walked through the room from the copy machine to his office. The smallest hint of surprise crossed his normally serene face for a second when he first turned the corner; then his face settled into the sweetly amused smile he always wears.

"Good!" I praised my clever students once they all got the order of words correct, then I erased the board and wrote: head, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes, ears, mouth, nose.

As we launched into the elementary school song, bending at the waist to touch our knees and toes, Chandra quietly closed his office door. That bemused little smile never left his face.