The Study of Voice

The voice, I believe, is one of the most misunderstood instruments. In the first place, one has to understand that it is an instrument and that to play this instrument with precision and beauty requires the development of a technique just as one would with the violin or piano. Now one could argue that any one can open their mouth and sing with out lessons and I would say yes. And anyone can bang out chopsticks on the piano without lessons but will they ever play a Beethoven Sonata or a Scott Joplin Rag? No, for these things require a mastery of the instrument, likewise the voice.
The voice is a wind instrument similar to a flute or an organ but with a single pipe. There are essentially two elements to master; 1.) creating and controlling breath pressure while maintaining a relaxed, free body and 2.) pinpointing the place of resonance in the vocal tract and capitalizing on it. Of course, this is much easier said than done.
I would say that the second element is the most difficult to teach in our current society as a cultures' speech pattern impacts an individuals' perception of their voice. This is the reason why there are different schools of singing between the English, French, Germans and Italians. Italy by far has produced the greatest number of fine singers because their use of their language is so conducive to resonant, vibrant singing with out straining.
Americans speak very differently from our English cousins. We have allowed our speech to become very guttural and lazy. Up to about 50 years ago elocution and public speaking were part of every public school curriculum. Now, you are only likely to find people who speak well in such occupations as theater, broadcasting, preaching and theater, including trained singers. The rest of us tend to form our language very low in the vocal tract with little or no breath pressure for support. This creates a lot of pressure on the vocal chords and they soon wear out. How many people, famous or otherwise, can you think of who seem to have a permanent case of laryngitis? This is a big problem in our society and makes the teaching of singing quite difficult.
Overcoming bad speech patterns can be like learning how to walk all over again. I often feel more like a speech pathologist than a teacher of singing. I coax the student to make subtle changes in the way they hold or shape their vocal tract, trying to help them feel and open the pharynx (upper vocal tract) as opposed to the larynx (lower vocal tract) and to support their sounds by creating internal breath pressure. For the student, it requires patience and persistent practice. Much of this is done through vocal exercises, scales. What you get out of voice lessons in directly proportionate to what you put into it. The same can be said about any kind of instruction. If you, the student, do not practice routinely through out the week, you are wasting your time and money! These things need to be come internalized and habitual. Once the proper sensations are felt and become habit, the student will be surprised at the ease in which one can project and sustain beautiful sounds and the beauty of the voice will last into old age.
I hope this brief glimpse of what is involved in singing lessons will help to dispel the myth that lessons are for learning songs. That you may try your budding skills on a song is secondary. Voice lessons are for learning how to make beautiful sounds with ease.





Research Base for
Word Wisdom
Research Base for
Word Wisdom
Jerry Zutell, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University
THE LANGUAGE ARTS COMPANY
Zaner-Bloser
Organizing for Vocabulary Instruction
One of the most important aspects of our language and literacy learning is
the acquisition of an extensive meaning vocabulary; that is, a large set of
words that we know and understand when we encounter them and that
we can use appropriately to express ourselves effectively.
Having an extensive meaning vocabulary is important for several reasons.
• Studies have consistently shown strong relationships between
student achievement in comprehension and the extent and
depth of their knowledge of word meanings (Chall, 1983). In
other words, understanding what we read is directly dependent
upon the breadth and depth of our vocabulary.
• Several experts hypothesize that the decrease in reading scores in
the middle grades, i.e., the “fourth grade slump” can be largely
attributed to the increasing vocabulary demands and new ideas
included in literature and content materials (e.g., Chall, 1983).
These often require a command of language beyond the language
that students need to communicate effectively in everyday
situations.
• Disturbingly, research has indicated that at-risk students often
begin school with smaller vocabularies than their peers and that
the extent and depth of their vocabularies grow at a slower rate.
Without intervention they fall further behind their classmates as
they progress through the grades (Becker, 1977).
• A deep and extensive vocabulary is especially important for
English speakers because English vocabulary is extremely com
plex. In The Roots of English, Robert Claiborne (1989) estimates
that English currently has three times as many individual words
as French and four times as many as Russian. English is known as
a language in which there may be many synonyms for represent
ing a concept, each one suggesting a slightly different shade of
meaning, being more appropriate in a specific context, and/or
indicating the background or class of the speaker/writer. Further,
English vocabulary continues to evolve over time.As new con
cepts and ideas are developed, new words are coined or old
words take on new meanings.Nagy and Anderson (1984) have
estimated that there are over 88,000 meaning families in school
English alone. Fortunately, not all words must be learned as individual
items.Many everyday words are built from base words
A well developed vocabulary
is essential for effective
communication; it influences
our abilities to listen,
speak, read, and write.
2
Strategic vocabulary
instruction provides
students with the tools
they need to unlock
meanings of new words
using context clues, word
roots, and reference skills.
plus endings. And a large number of more sophisticated words are
members of root word families, constructed from a combination of
English, Greek, and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Students who
understand these relationships can often use them to unlock word
meanings and retain those connections in memory.
While it is clear that students learn a considerable number of words from
assigned and independent reading, it is also clear that vocabulary development
should be a major focus of instruction from the earliest grades, in
order to insure that students recognize the importance of learning word
meanings and to provide them with the skills for discovering those meanings
in the course of their own reading.
Word Wisdom: An Effective, Research-
Based Vocabulary Program
It is estimated that the typical student learns approximately 3,000 words per
year and that the size of children’s vocabularies doubles between third and
seventh grades (Bauman, Kame’enui, and Ash, 2003).These estimates make it
clear that teachers cannot teach a large proportion of the words students
need to learn.The vast majority of these must come from wide reading and
listening. Still, an effective approach to vocabulary instruction will
include the regular and direct teaching of a chosen set of words.
These words will not only be important in themselves, but they must also
serve as anchors and examples for independent learning. Regular instruction
keeps students focused on the importance of word learning and gives them
the tools to unlocking word meanings as they encounter new words in their
assigned and independent reading.
Researchers vary in their estimates of the number of words to be taught
formally, ranging from 250 to 400 a year. But the current consensus is that
it is more effective to provide multiple interactions that allow for deep
processing of word meanings than it is to cover a larger number of words
in a superficial way. Using multiple-choice items alone is not sufficient
(Stahl, 1999).
While there is little research to support the teaching of specific words at specific
grade levels (as compared to frequency count approaches for reading
and spelling), Beck,McKeown,and Kucan (2002, p.19) do offer some principles
for word selection.“Tier Two”words, as they describe them, should
• appear frequently across a wide variety of domains.
3
Understanding of word
parts and formations
can be used to elicit the
meanings of new words.
• be words that can be worked with in a variety of ways so students
can build rich representations and make connections to
other words and contexts.
• be words for which students have the general concept, but for
which they can add precision and specificity.
Research and analysis also supports instruction in word structure to
increase vocabulary development.Many English words are not isolated
items, but are built through combinations of prefixes, roots, and suffixes,
many of them taken from Latin, Greek, and/or the Germanic roots of our
language. Often the knowledge of these individual parts can be used effectively
to help discover the meaning of the whole.
Blachowicz and Fisher (2000, p. 504) suggest four research-supported principles
that should be incorporated to make a vocabulary program effective:
• Students should be actively involved in word learning.
• Word learning should include a personalized component.
• Students should be immersed in words.
• Multiple sources and repeated exposures should be incorporated
in instruction.
Word Wisdom is constructed to be consistent with all of these research
findings in order to deliver effective vocabulary instruction and to maximize
student learning.
In traditional vocabulary series, there often seems to be little rhyme or reason
as to why words are put together in a given lesson. In Word Wisdom,
each unit is organized around a conceptual theme to build strong meaning
relationships among the words to be studied and with the concepts
they represent.
Each unit is organized into three instructional lessons and a review lesson.
Each of the first three lessons begins with a reading selection that reinforces
the theme and grounds vocabulary study in the context of meaningful
reading. In addition, each lesson directly and explicitly builds skills and
strategies for discovering word meanings.
In Part 1, a specific type of context clues strategy is explained and modeled.
For example, students might be directed to attend to information
about a setting or location as a clue. Students apply that type of context
clues strategy, as well as others they have learned, to predict word meanings.
Then they check those predictions against the student-friendly
explanations (Beck,McKeown, and Kucan, 2002) in the Word Wisdom
Students build schematic
maps of word relationships
through concept/content
interaction.
4
Deep processing of word
meanings results from the
Unlock, Process, and Apply
instructional plan and frequent
reviews.
dictionary and the context to determine the appropriate meanings for the
words under study.
Part 2 is built around Latin and/or Greek roots directly connected to the
theme of the unit. For example, a unit on communication might include a
root for speaking (e.g., -loq- as in elocution), one for listening (e.g., -audi- as
in audible), and one for calling (e.g., -voc- as in convocation).
Part 3 provides instruction and practice with theme words and topics
using a variety of reference sources including dictionaries, encyclopedias,
thesauruses, and Internet sources. Students are not only instructed in how
to locate particular items, but also in how to choose synonyms and definitions
appropriate to the context.
Thus, in the course of a unit, students learn about, actively use, and integrate
the three primary means of discovering word meanings: context,
word structure, and reference sources. The process of using these
types of information is reinforced throughout the unit with specific activities
in each lesson that explicitly ask students to use these three kinds of
information together.
In Word Wisdom, students encounter each word several times during
the course of a lesson.These multiple exposures support deep processing
as students are directed to Unlock, Process, and Apply word
meanings. In addition, regular writing and speaking activities help students
build connections between word uses and meanings and their personal
experiences.
Each unit in Word Wisdom also includes a review lesson. This lesson
serves several purposes: It provides students with the opportunity to work
with all thirty of the words taught in the unit in a single lesson, thus reinforcing
the relationships among the words and their connection to the
unit’s theme. It provides added exposure for each word to maximize word
learning. And specific activities are structured to give students practice in
answering test-like questions so that their performance on such tests more
accurately reflects the depth and breadth of their vocabulary knowledge.
The Teacher Edition also includes many practical ideas and activities that
provide further engagement with the words under study to broaden and
deepen student understanding. Regularly using the recommended speaking
and writing extensions, personal vocabulary journals, and suggestions
for home, curriculum, and Internet connections can insure that students
apply word meanings and connect them to their other studies and
5
personal experiences.This integration across times, places, and subjects
motivates students to become active word learners and is a powerful tool
to enhance achievement across academic areas.
The Word Wisdom CD-ROM that accompanies each level includes additional
resources for practice, reteaching, and enrichment. By doing these
activities for each unit, students consolidate and strengthen their understanding
of the word meanings they have studied and more fully explore
and organize those meanings in relation to words
• from the same roots,
• connected to the same theme,
• with closely related but at times slightly different meanings.
These activities often challenge students to go beyond the unit words,
building connections to and experience with a richer vocabulary.
• Word cards can be used in a variety of ways and/or games to
practice associating words with specific meanings.They can also
be used to sort words into categories that aid students in under
standing relationships between words and concepts.
• Root cards can be used with known prefixes and suffixes to
strengthen student understanding of word structure and its connection
to meaning.
• Semantic Mapping (Graphic Organizers) supports students in
organizing the concepts and relationships important to a given
theme, at times adding words and categories that fill out the “big
picture” and locating the words studied in that domain of knowledge.
• Word Ladders encourage students to consider the range of mean
ings conveyed by a group of words that may extend from synonyms
to antonyms, the place of studied words in that range, and
the value of word choice to convey specific shades of meaning in
the appropriate context.Recent research and national reviews of
research (e.g., National Reading Panel Report, 2001) strongly
emphasize the critical contribution of vocabulary knowledge to
proficient reading.Yet, systematic, research-based vocabulary
instruction appears to be the exception rather than the rule in
elementary and middle grade classrooms.This may well be due to
the fact that, up to this point, school districts and teachers have
had few comprehensive, organized resources available to support
teachers in delivering such instruction.Word Wisdom has been
specifically designed to address this need.










Voices That Matter
To reach the higher rungs of class respectability, voices had to be “legible,”
assessed in elocutionary terms of “clarity” and “purity of tone.” Anna Russell’s
The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader (1853) described an uncultivated voice
as smudged like a printer’s error: “It resembles, in its effect to the ear, that
presented to the eye, when the sheet has been accidentally disturbed in the
press, and there comes forth, instead of the clear, dark, well-defined letter,
executed distinctly on the fair white page, a blur of half-shade” (p. 15).
Elocution was tinctured with printer’s ink. It would do for platform and
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social performance what printer’s type did for scribal culture: systematize,
standardize, and reproduce exemplary models in which the idiosyncrasy and
excess of the oral could be repressed, regulated, and recirculated. Elocution
developed and flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries during the crucial
period of the rise of industrial capitalism and advance of science, reason, engineering,
and commitment to progress and improvement. E. P. Thompson
(1963) argued that the industrial “pressures towards discipline and order
extended from the factory . . . into every aspect of life: leisure, personal relationships,
speech, manners” (p. 401). As part of the same historical and cultural
milieu, elocution drew from the same vocabulary: One of its early
formations was called the “mechanical school” of elocution (Mattingly,
1972; Roach, 1985). Elocution expressed in another key the body discipline
so characteristic of industrial capitalism, but this was a discipline imposed
on the bourgeoisie, a way for them to mark “distinction” from the masses
(Bourdieu, 1984). Punning on the title of Walter Benjamin’s (1969) wellknown
essay, we can think of elocution as the management of voice in the
age of mechanical reproduction.
Elocution was designed to recuperate the vitality of the spoken word from
rural and rough working-class contexts by regulating and refining its “performative
excess” through principles, science, systematic study, and standards of
taste and criticism (Butler, 1997, p. 152). Textual enclosure was the technology
of control; thus elocution, an art of the spoken word, was circumscribed
by literacy. Ambivalently related to orality, elocution sought to tap the power
of popular speech but curb its unruly embodiments and refine its coarse and
uncouth features. It was the verbal counterpart, in the domain of speech, of
the enclosure acts that confiscated the open commons so crucial to the hardscrabble
livelihood and recreation of the poor and privatized them for the
privileged classes. Elocution seized the spoken word, the common currency to
which the illiterate poor had open access, and made it uncommon, fencing it
off with studied rules, regulations, and refinements. An art of linguistic enclosure,
elocution’s historical rise and development corresponded roughly with the
legislative acts of enclosure and displacement, the “clearances,” that produced
“surplus populations” and cheap labor for urban factories (Marx, 1867/1930,
pp. 803–807). The pulpit and the lectern were the loci classici, exemplary sites
of demonstration, but these capital sites extended to everyday speech and presentation
of self. Elocution was practiced by professional public speakers and
readers but was also embodied as a general social sign of gentility as the bourgeoisie
conversed, read aloud, and entertained in their parlors. The hegemony
of the pulpit and lectern extended into the habitus of the class-conscious home.
Coextensive with sartorial codes, like dress it was a way of displaying social
status and class background.
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Elocution promoted a sizing up of bodies and auditing of voices, a critical
scrutiny of “the grain of the voice” (Barthes, 1985). There was a political economy
of the voice: How one spoke was part of a circuit of comparison and
exchange that produced social value, “the ‘sonorous materiality’ of words
exchanged” (Certeau, 1997, p. 102). Voices were “cultivated” and traded up.
The thriving business of elocutionary lectures, training manuals, exercises,
lessons, handbooks, workshops, and demonstrations pivoted on this trading
up of voices and acquisition of “vocal superiority,” vocal capital (Rush, 1879,
p. 578). According to James Rush (1879), author of a key elocutionary text,
The Philosophy of the Human Voice, “Intonation and other modes of the
voice” betray class pretenders to “a cultivated ear” (p. 480), to “the ear of a
refined and educated taste” (p. 518). Rush reveals that elocutionary proprieties
were staked in overlapping class and racial tension with his choice of negative
examples: “Hence with a Slavery agitator” and “an abolition preacher about
the streets, there is equally an ignorant disregard to the proper, and certainly to
the elegant uses of the voice” (p. 480).
The opening scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852/1994) dramatizes the elocutionary surveillance and auditing of
other bodies and voices. Stowe introduces one of her most contemptible characters,
the slave trader Haley, by immediately subjecting him to a close critical
examination of body, voice, and demeanor: “He was a short, thick-set man, with
coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which
marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world” (p. 1).
Air was a key word grounded in the dramaturgy of social relations; it referred
to a style of personal presentation, demeanor, that registered class tension, as in
“putting on airs.” Stowe encourages the cultivated reader to “catch” this slave
catcher in the act of class pretension. She first tells us that his speech was “in
free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar” (p. 1) and then dramatizes his
slips and class-marked dialect: “Yes, I consider religion a valeyable thing in a
nigger, when it’s the genuine article, and no mistake” (p. 2). Later, she describes
him as someone who “slowly recited” texts: “He was not a remarkably fluent
reader, and was in the habit of reading in a sort of recitative half-aloud”
(p. 101). Haley’s labored oral reading skills are in marked contrast to the elocutionary
ability of light-skinned blacks, particularly Cassy: “She then read
aloud, in a soft voice, and with a beauty of intonation” (p. 313).
Haley’s “gentleman” interlocutor, Mr. Shelby, escapes critical inspection;
the narrator keeps at a respectful remove and quickly merges him into the
class habitus of his “well-furnished dining parlor”: “Mr. Shelby . . . had the
appearance of a gentleman, and the arrangements of the house, and the general
air of the housekeeping indicated easy, and even opulent circumstances”
(p. 1). Genteel bodies pass as unmarked norms of decorum, whereas
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“low-bred” and “vulgar” bodies are marked by their deviancy from bourgeois
standards of taste.
Throughout the novel, Stowe articulates racial and class identity and
moral character against norms of elocution in complex and troubling ways.
The imbrication of colorism and elocution is particularly disturbing. The “full
blacks” speak in thick dialect with “barbarous, guttural, half-brute intonation”
(p. 300), whereas the light-skinned “mulatto” George Harris “talked
so fluently, held himself so erect” (p. 10) and had a self-possessed “attitude,
eye, voice, manner” of speaking (p. 172). Stowe’s class animosity is expressed
in grotesque descriptions of “low-bred” whites whose coarse features and
elocutionary shortcomings correspond with moral flaws. These characters—
Haley, Loker, and Legree—speak in dialect and are not quite white (Jacobson,
1998). Stowe’s detailed, head-to-toe inspections of working-class white bodies
ironically mirrors the scene of invasive physical examination of black bodies
for sale at auction (p. 289).4
Elocutionary protocols anticipated Judith Butler’s (1993) theory of performativity
as the reiteration, “citation,” of a set of norms, but elocution would
rework performativity as disembodied citationality into a re-embodied recitationality
(p. 14). The normative would become naturalized through habitual
performance, and the hegemonic force is captured in Rush’s (1879) description
of elocutionary discipline as “frequent repetition” becoming “an eficacious
[sic] habit” until “atention [sic] fading into habit” enables “the shore to
be reached, and the life to be saved” (p. 479). But the metaphor of swimming,
“sucesfully [sic] employed in danger,” reminds us that elocution was part of
a punitive regime of body discipline and vocal discrimination (p. 479).
The “natural school” of elocution demonstrates how hegemony works:
that is, what is really cultured and acquired masquerades as “nature,” thereby
concealing its invention and artifice (Vandraegan, 1949). The artistic bedrock
of “natural” expression is revealed in Rush’s (1879) observation that “the
world of Taste goes to the Theater to hear the purest style of Elocution”
(478). Although every inch a studied disciplining and remaking of body
and voice to accrue class distinction, elocution was ideologically masked as
“natural language” (Fliegelman, 1993, pp. 79–94). The uncultivated were
then marked as aberrant and unnatural, corruptions of nature. Elocution
wielded the double-edged sword of “nature” against the poor and untutored.
Too little cultivation of taste and manners branded one as coarse and uncouth,
a transgressor of “universal” laws of “truth, propriety, and taste” that were
“drawn from nature” (Rush, 1879, p. 477). On the other hand, too selfconscious
a presentation of refinement led to charges of “afectation [sic]”
(p. 477). The upwardly mobile classes had to run an elocutionary gauntlet
between “awkwardness” and “afectation,” too little or too much art (p. 477).
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But it was the rerouting of literacy through oral communication, however
refined and regulated, that rendered elocution vulnerable to penetration and
pilfering from the very classes it was erected against. The spoken-word
dimension of elocution provided for the “spillage” from the enclosed written
word that the unlettered poor swept up and made their own (Linebaugh,
1992, p. 168). According to John Brewer (1997), the elocutionary practice
of public readings mediated the divide between literate elite and illiterate
laborers:
Reading aloud, both in public and in private, was a universal practice that
enabled non-readers to share in the pleasures of the literate. In homes, taverns,
coffee houses, in fields and on the street, oral and literate cultures were married
through the ministrations of the public reader. (p. 187)
Thompson’s monumental history The Making of the English Working
Class (1963) is replete with examples of “radical reading rooms” where “the
custom of reading aloud the Radical periodicals, for the benefit of the illiterate”
nurtured “the values of intellectual inquiry and of mutuality”
(p. 743). Thompson includes the description of a remarkable, subversive
oral reading at a meeting of an underground insurrectionary movement in a
field near Sheffield in 1800:
“[A]t 10 o’clock in the Evening—an orator in a Mask harangues the people—
reads [aloud] letters from distant societies by the light of a candle and immediately
burns them” (p. 474).
Henry Mayhew (1861/1968) amply documented “street elocution” and
“street recitations” in his first volume of London Labour and the London
Poor, thus making clear that the laboring classes and lumpenproletariat
“pitched” and repackaged an elite performance form to their own subaltern
needs and recycled it within the scrappy survival economy of the streets
(pp. 232–238). They developed their own ethno-aesthetics and standards of
evaluation; with a wink to his middle-class reader, Mayhew refers to the discriminating
Fredrick Matthias Alexander was born in Tasmania in the year 1869. As a child he was often ill , too ill to go to school and so he was educated at home. He developed a passion for the plays of Shakespeare and left home in his early teens to take voice and elocution lessons in Melbourne with view to becoming an actor. He formed his own theatre company which toured New Zealand and he knew some success, however he often experienced hoarseness and the loss of the power of his voice during performances.
The many doctors he consulted recommended rest cure. Sometimes he would not speak aloud for two weeks before an important recital, but even under these very strict conditions he found it hard to get to the end of a performance without his hoarseness reoccurring. His capacity for logical thinking obliged him to conclude that there was something in what he himself was doing which was causing the problem and his doctor agreed. When he asked his doctor what this was his doctor admitted that he could not tell him. With this Alexander set about finding the cause for himself, armed only with three mirrors and his unique powers of observation.
He noticed that when he got ready to recite he tensed his neck muscles which pulled his head back and down. At about the same time he took in a noisy gasp of air which compressed his vocal cords and tensed his body as a whole which appeared shorter. Alexander found ways of altering this habit of getting ready to recite and the result was after a long period of practice his voice problem disappeared.
The improvement in his performance was so noticeable that others asked him how he had achieved this, and as he started to observe others as a result of their questions he noticed that far from being a problem which affected only himself , the problems of gasping in air, tensing the neck, throwing back the head and depressing the vocal cords was very widespread and affected almost everyone in varying degrees. As he applied himself increasingly to helping his fellow actors it was not long before doctors started to send him their patients and in the end these people outnumbered his pupils from the arts seeking to improve their performance.
At this stage F.M. as he was known recruited his brother A.R. to join him in teaching the technique he had developed and he transferred his practice to Sydney where they were both soon inundated with work. It was J.W. Steward McKay, a famous surgeon at Lewisham Hospital who tried to persuade Alexander that the technique which he had developed was of such great value to man that he should travel to London in order to secure his work the recognition that it deserved. He set sail for London in April 1904 and until the outbreak of the first world war he gave lessons in his technique to many of the famous people of the time in all walks of life as everyone is concerned by the way in which we move. His first book, Man’s Supreme Inheritance was published in 1910.
During the war he went to America and almost every year from 1914 to 1924 he crossed the Atlantic in October and returned to England in the Spring. In 1920 he married Edith Page and they adopted a daughter Peggy. In 1923 Alexander’s second book Constructive Concious Control of the Individual, was published. Professor John Dewey and Dr Peter MacDonald both helped him to describe in words the experience of what he wanted to convey.
In 1930 Alexander set up a training course for Student teachers, and in 1932 published The Use of the Self which was the best selling of his four books in the U.K. although it did not do as well of some of his other books in the U.S. In the years before the second world war he achieved the greatest recognition for his work but once again the war interrupted the flow of pupils so in 1940 at the age of seventy-one he set sail for America with his teaching assistants. He published The Universal Constant in Living before returning to London in 1943 and after the war worked hard to set up his training course for teachers again. In 1947 he had a stroke which left him paralysed on the left side and doctors gave little hope that a man of seventy-nine could overcome such crippling consequences, but within a year he was again giving lessons to others in mobility, and continued to do so until his death in 1955.