Saturday, July 23, 2011

The inner game of pronunciation learning

Clip art: Clker
The "ancient" Taoists and Lessac had it right, when it came to rehabilitation--among other things. The central concept was to focus on managing what was going on in the body and begin the healing/learning process there, being far less concerned with external appearance and incoming sounds.

In the last two years or so, as you can see from the  near 700 blog posts, I have been reporting on research that looks at learning that is less aural (listening-based) and visual (relying on sight as the lead system in learning new sounds). In a very real sense some of the key insights have come from research and practice in rehabilitation methodologies developed for the blind (haptic computer interfaces), deaf (sign and haptic systems) and physically disabled (especially tactile-enabled prosthetics and robotics). Much of the genius of Lessac was his ability to interpret to the Western mind (and body) how to also learn from the inside out. We may yet be able to rehabilitate pronunciation teaching!

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