Teacher verbalization of targets in Suzuki string lessons

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe the topics that teachers addressed and the quality of student performance trials in 48 violin and cello lessons taught by 12 expert Suzuki string teachers. One representative excerpt of work on a repertoire piece that was familiar to the student was analyzed from each of two lesson videotapes from each teacher. Teachers worked on intonation, note accuracy and bow distribution more frequently than on other types of targets. Students were more successful when teachers expressed goals in terms of specific physical actions (e.g., move the bow faster, place first finger closer to the nut) than when teachers described changes in terms of musical effects (e.g., make a crescendo here, Bflat needs to be lower). As the difficulty of the repertoire, and commensurately the skill levels of the students, increased, string teachers described a greater number of goals in terms of musical outcome than in terms of physical gestures.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.