FLUERETTE SWEENEY SC, President of the Living Language Institute, worked closely with Mary Helen Richards of the Richards Institute for Music Education and Research from the 1960’s until the 1990’s. In the 1970s and 1980s she taught courses entitled Education Through Music (ETM) throughout the British Columbia Lower Mainland, and in the years immediately preceding her retirement from teaching in 1995, she taught courses at the University of British Columbia, entitled Whole Child/Whole Music. Social play within the context of folk song-games was an essential component in all of these courses. Concurrently with her teaching in North America, Fleurette worked closely with dozens of Japanese teachers teaching English in Japan since 1980. These teachers, all of whom were non-native speakers of English, found that playing folk song-games was a particularly effective context for establishing a strong oral basis for English among their students. Fluerette completed her doctoral thesis at the University of British Columbia based on Sound to Symbol.
