Haptic control

This is an extraordinary piece by William Bogard on societal and phenomenological dimensions of haptic control or management or influence.

Haptic Exploration

In a very real sense, the term "haptic exploration" as defined by Scholarpedia is consistent with the HIPoeces approach to pronunciation instruction. The haptic engagement is experienced by the learner both as exploration of the embodied sound system and simultaneously as a potentially powerful provider of anchors for learning and recall.

Haptic is hot!

Not immediately relevant to our research but it does suggest that "haptic" rocks . . . or at least that HIPoeces is "hip!"

Improving Haptic Memory

In principle, the haptic emphasis in HIPoeces systems should serve to enhance a learner's haptic memory or at least highten awareness of touch in locations that are used for anchoring sounds and sound processes. For some learners the addition of touch to the "ganglion" of auditory-visual-kinesthetic is exceedingly powerful from the outset. For others, it develops adequately for the system to work. For some, their sense of touch seems relatively disconnected and may require some type of training as evident in the touch game in the video. The idea of working with all learners on haptic memory improvement, outside of the pedagogical process itself, may be worth exploring as well.

Haptic "Vision" and New Media

Interesting summary of earlier research into the impact of some new media forms: the brain experiences it in areas associated with touch. Here is a second theoretical piece on "haptic vision" which connects vision and touch more directly.

Exercise and short term memory

In the event that you have any rats in your class, exercising them will apparently help to clear out their short term memories, sending the contents there into more permanent storage, giving them more "space" to learn more with. Now if we can just find a pronunciation class to try that out on . . .

Teaching lexical stress in Media Hyper-Culture

The continued emphasis on teaching rules for assigning lexical stress, especially to students who have access to good audio sources of relevant English input in today's expanding media melieu is becoming more and more questionable, a potential anachronism worth examining. The focus even a decade ago on preparing students to correctly guess at lexical stress, generally assuming lack of audio models, made sense for many students, especially those in pre-academic programs where their experience was still basically visual, print-based. In today's media culture, where for most internet access to appropriate models of English pronunciation is a reality, the notion that getting lexical stress still has to be essentially a "visual" problem makes less and less sense. In HIPoeces methodology, the assumption is that by effective multi-dimensional anchoring of a new word--including its lexical stress pattern, the necessity of excessive attention to the metacognitive sets of stress assignment rules is becoming quickly redundant, and in many cases not necessary at all. How much time a method, any method, assigns to conscious work on lexical stress rules and its efficacy is certainly worth review.

Visual learning in multi-sensory environments

The complex interrelationships between visual, auditory and haptic modalities in learning reviewed in this article address one of the central claims in HIPoeces work: that simultaneous engagement of positions in the visual field, accessed and designated by movement and touch, and anchored by both auditory feedback through the ears and somatic resonance in the bones of the neck and skull form a very powerful nexus.That drawing together of sensory data in one "clump," along with the metacognitive, linguistic context of the sound, word or larger construction (what we refer to as a TAG = touch-activated ganglion) is key.