This is a ten minute presentation I gave at the recent International House Teachers’ Online Conference (IHTOC60) on the Tai Chi of Reading.
The basic premise is that there are certain movements or forms that exist within the Tai Chi Chuan and Baduan Jin which can be used to illustrate successful reading strategies, particularly for exam based classes.
I’m not suggesting that this is something everyone should do with every class, but that for some classes, where the learners might benefit from having a physical analogue for their mental process, it might help remind them of what they should be doing.
The video runs to about 16 minutes, which isn’t bad for a ten minute talk, and can be seen here:
If you want to take a bit more time to process any of the information on the slides in the presentation then these are available to view on Slideshare below, though the video demonstrations of the Tai Chi / Baduan Jin motions won’t play in Slideshare.
My thanks to Neil Morley for graciously acting as a Tai Chi model and thus allowing me to hide my own ineptitude in the forms, to Neil McMahon and Shaun Wilden for putting in the work to organise and run the conference, and to the International House World Organisation for allowing the re-post of the materials here.
To view recordings of any of the 60 (yes that’s right… 60!) presentations from the online conference, check out the conference blog: http://ihtoc60.blogspot.co.uk/
teflgeek 
Tuesday 25 June 2013 at 12:20
What a fab idea! Maybe not for everyone, but I love it. I do Chi Gung and some Tai Chi… BTW I think the point of Chi Gung is that it’s specifically to work on health.
Tuesday 25 June 2013 at 12:24
Hi Rachel,
I’m only a Tai Chi novice and haven’t been doing it long enough to have looked into the background and history of it, though I’m aware that there are different schools and traditions in Tai Chi. This started with a class where we were doing some finger moving as a physical representation of the reading strategies and as we were doing it I realised that the Tai Chi forms might be better analogues…
Glad you liked the post!
David