What students want: Real-time, on-the-spot, impromptu correction of pronunciation!

Credit: © Terence Mendoza
 / Fotolia

We just finished putting together a proposal to do a conference workshop:

Conducting On-the-spot Corrections of Rhythm, Stress and Intonation: Haptic Baton! 

"This workshop focuses on a haptic (movement + touch) technique for correcting and modelling pronunciation during any classroom activity—using a pencil, much like an orchestra conductor. The key is to include a set of “haptic anchors,” where the baton touches the other hand on stressed syllables of problematic words."

The point of the workshop is to develop a (haptic) technique that " . . . can be done in a relatively unobtrusive manner, a brief pause that provides clarity but will not seriously disrupt the flow or coherence of the classroom activity or lesson." Just ask your students if they'd like more impromptu correction of pronunciation . . . 

 

Now who knows if it will be accepted. (Haptic pronunciation proposals have about a 50/50 chance of being accepted. We still need to get the word out!) But a new study by Smith, Boomer, Zakrzewski, Roeder, Church, and Ashby of University of California, Santa Barbara.. "Deferred Feedback Sharply Dissociates Implicit and Explicit Category Learning," just summarized by Science Daily seems to add support to the use of "real-time" interventions--if done right, of course! 

In essence, what the research suggests is that deferred feedback does not connect well with implicit learning. (Well, actually, there is a great deal more to it than that! The research is actually looking at the nature of the two cognitive systems that we use to learn with, one explicit; the other, implicit.) When ongoing feedback on performance of a sorting task was suppressed or absent, implicit learning was dramatically impeded.

Your in-class, pronunciation teaching feedback protocols in need of a little correction? 

Keep in touch!