Spring 23 KINETIK Courses!

Spring 2023 KINETIK courses now scheduled. 

KINETIK Method: a full-body/haptic approach to both pronunciation teaching and enhancing memory for course content. (Haptic: employing movement/gesture and touch)

English Fluency and Pronunciation Course

• For nonnative English speaking students, adults of upper intermediate level and above
• For those who need to improve their speaking fluency and pronunciation of English.
• Especially designed for those who do not have the opportunity to speak English often enough, or have pronunciation problems that are difficult to change.

• 11 weeks in length, 75 minutes per week, plus optional, 60-minute review session

 begins on January 26^th, 2023.

Thursdays, 5:00~6:15 p.m. – Live Class--on campus (or by viewing the class video later)

 Homework: 15-20 minutes per day for best results. 

Wednesdays, 5:00-6:00 p.m. -- Optional homework practice review on Zoom (or by viewing the class videos later)

• Instructor: Bill Acton, MATESOL Department, Trinity Western University 
• For additional information: william.acton@twu.ca
• Certificate is awarded for 80% attendance. Books and recorded practice videos are provided.

• Course fee: $500 CAD for on campus course. ($200 CAD for access to the 11 class videos only)

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KINETIK Method Instructor Certificate Course: 12 weeks, Online, beginning 1/30

• Objectives
• Basics of haptic pronunciation teaching
• Techniques for enhancing memory for course content
• Enhanced (instructor's) classroom speaking model and pedagogical presence 
• Weekly schedule
• 30-minute training (recorded, available Monday)
• ~60 minutes of "homework" (pre-reading and practice)
• 60-minute live seminar on Zoom (arranged according to participants' schedules, usually on Saturday evening, PST)
• $600 USD, materials provided
• Certificate provided upon successful completion
• Full-refund (no questions asked) up to Week 4
• Preliminary Zoom interview required (contact: wracton@gmail.com)

If you are an instructor, considering having your students take EFPC, contact me and I'll be happy to discuss the course with you. With sufficient enrolment, both courses can be offered for just one school.

Ben Bruno's "10 Commandments of physical training" applied to pronunciation teaching!

Ben Bruno, personal trainer to the stars, has a super set of principles for training that could as well be a guide to (haptic) pronunciation teaching. Use the following as something of a test for your method about either: 

Here they are: (the boldfacing and extrapolations are mine!)

1. Thou shalt not train through pain.

    💪 Pronunciation work works when at least you can focus just on it for bit. 

2. Think of strength training as your entrée and cardio as the side dish. Both have their place but divvy your time and energy accordingly. 

    💪 At least for a time, attention to accurate, good form must supersede being fluent. 

3. The hard exercises that you hate doing are generally the ones that work the best. Sorry. 

    💪 Repetition, especially where a new physical patterning is being established, may not be mentally stimulating but it can be key to establishing the anchoring and access for a new sound or word. 

4. You can always make a mistake not to train, but at some point you just have to make time for it. Or be weak and out of shape. 

    💪 For most learners, consistent, relatively long term practice is key. And, like physical training, a new sound or pattern is not acquired unless do, indeed, "use it or lose it" if there is not sufficient consistent practice. 

5. Thou shalt train thy legs. 

    💪 The "legs" of pronunciation work is at least the rest of the body from the neck down, but in haptic work, the entire mind-body nexus. 

6. Mobility work is boring. Do it anyway.

    💪 The analogs here are (a) warming up or stretching, and (b) general fluency exercises where the body moves "fluently," along with speaking, for example. 

7. Remember that outside the gym, no one cares what you did for your workout, or about your diet. Keep it to yourself

    💪 Unless you are working with somebody, like a partner or instructor, your progress and goals are critical and only you can judge how things are going, certainly not a non-informed bystander. 

8. Similarly, nobody cares how much you lift. Drop the ego, drop the weight, and do it right. Form matters. 

    💪 Two principles there, dropping the ego . . . and form (See Principle #2)

9. Train the muscles  you can't see in the mirror (glutes, hamstrings, back, etc.) more than the muscles that you can see (pecs, biceps, etc.). It's good for you, and just because you can't see them, everyone else still can.

    💪 In other words, the rest of the body, especially the quality and resonance of your voice, overall relaxation and breathing techniques

10. Don't overcomplicate things. Always be learning, but at some point you have to put down the books and pick up the weights. 

    💪 The  bottom line: The process requires extensive "performance" without overthink or even conscious processing of the meaning of what is being spoken out loud for success. 

Ben's 10 has improved my approach to both kinds of training already--since both are so interrelated anyway. In fact, it will form something of the foundation for a new project I'm working on. 

Keep in touch!

Bill

Context, AI voice technology, haiku and (pronunciation) teaching

Two studies just published and summarized by ScienceDaily.com together illustrate how critical context is to understanding and (pronunciation) teaching. One is on the impact of voice technology; the other, on AI-assisted or created Haiku. 

In the first, How voice technology influences what we reveal about ourselves, by Melzner, Bonezzi, and Meyvis, published originally in the Journal of Marketing Research, it was revealed that customers, not surprisingly, will reveal more about themselves, directly or indirectly when responding by speaking to automated systems, rather than interacting on the keyboard with text messaging. Some of that "revelation" is actually paralinguistic (voice characteristics such as pitch and pacing) and background sounds. In other words . . . context. 

In the Haiku study, Basho in the machine: Humans find attributes of beauty and discomfort in algorithmic haiku, by Ueda at Kyoto University Institute for the Future of Human and Society, discovered, basically, that subjects rated haiku created by humans collaborating with AI higher, in general, than Haiku created just by AI or humans, but, if they suspected the engagement of AI in the process, the ratings went down. (Exactly how subjects were prompted to check for that is not indicated, but just the very suggestion of possible AI "meddling" had to have a pervasive effect, undermining the validity of the study, potentially skewing the perceptions and expectations of the subjects . . . )

(Full disclosure, having lived in Japan for a decade, I came away with a great appreciation for haiku, such that it gradually became both my preferred genre for reading pleasure and poetic expression.) 

How does this all tie together with pronunciation teaching? In both studies, context is critical. In fact, haiku only works when the context is either provided in advance and often explained in great detail OR where the subjects have grown up in . . . well . . .Japan, where the form is encountered from infancy. Great haiku as an art form, itself, generally recreates context (or possible contexts) in the mind of the devotee/reader. In both cases, comprehension is grounded in context, not in the form, itself. 

So it is with pronunciation teaching as well. It is possible to work with pronunciation out of explicit context and the sounds or patterns be later available in spontaneous language use, but the treatment has to have almost "haiku-like" in salience for the learner. On the other hand, the immediate context of let's say attention to a consonant, as in the AI voice study, is encoded along with the targeted sound, e.g., the voice characteristics, including stress and disruptive performance markers of student and model, the room ambience, and the neurology and biomes of learners and instructors all--and all either enabling or disabling recall later. 

In other words, unless context, in several senses, is working for  you or being proactively generated in pronunciation work, the odds are not with you. For that reason, in part, the KINETIK method approach and others like it are designed to consistently embed pronunciation in regular, good course content or personally memorable, engaging narrative of some kind, where the chances of the focus of the work being remembered should be at least better, or at least with less clutter. 

O AI, eh? Aye!
O the story is long but . . . 
The tail is longer

Sources: 

American Marketing Association. (2022, November 30). How voice technology influences what we reveal about ourselves. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 20, 2022 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/11/221130114606.htm

Kyoto University. (2022, December 2). Basho in the machine: Humans find attributes of beauty and discomfort in algorithmic haiku. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 20, 2022 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221201122920.htm

Bite your chopstick, knave! (How restricting imitation might enhance empathy but not pronunciation teaching!)

This piece from Neurosciencenews.com (or as we tend to call it: New-Old-Science) on empathy and imitation, using chopsticks, is just too much fun to let pass. The study  by Matsuda et al at Hokaido University, titled “Imitation inhibition and facial expression recognition: Imitation-inhibition training inhibits the impact of interference with facial mimicry”, was basically getting at something similar to the "startle reflex," that is responding (sometimes) too fast emotionally. That is a common feature of PTSD, the body processing things way ahead of the conscious mind; you respond, in effect, without thinking. At some level, empathy is also like that. 

In the study, the treatment group was trained to "respond more slowly" to images on a screen by having to perform an action with fingers requiring some processing time. The "pièce de résistance," however, was that in the test phase, both the treatment and control groups were required to bite down on a chopstick which (quote) " . . .  inhibited their ability to mimic facial expressions." With that add on filter, the chopstick, the treatment group was better/faster at recognizing facial expressions than the control group. Now exactly why the chopstick was necessary is not explained, but it was apparently needed to cancel out initial, unconscious facial/physical imitation that would have complicated things. 

The conclusion: "These results suggest that imitation-inhibition training increases self-reported empathy and allows for a similar level of recognition of others’ emotional states, regardless of discrepancies between the condition of self and others."

Wow . . . 

So . . . suppressing initial emotional response, in this case realized in facial imitation, enhances empathy partially defined as being able to recognize emotions in others. That is certainly an aspect of the metacognitive dimension of empathy, or maybe empathy, Japanese style? I have lived there; could be, in fact!

But what might that same suppression of imitative "mirroring" do during learning, of pronunciation, let's say . . . I can tell you, actually. 

That is a near perfect metaphor or analogy for instruction that either formally or informally restricts body response and engagement, which is far too often the case. Imitation today has a bad name in the field, in part, seen as being essentially simplistic, noncognitive. Consequently, that is how it is treated or applied, dismissed as being not meaningful enough or superficial. And without holistic body engagement in the first place, that is . . . well . . . accurate. 

The implicit restrictions today on spontaneous body response, to a large extent the result of  conscious/cognitive bias and media (versus face-to-face interaction) involvement in the field--at least in  adult education--work against us, the learner and learning. 

The "chopstick chomp" at least has entertainment value . . . and being able to read other's emotions, detached from your body and your own has got to be a good thing, occasionally.  

So try the "Chopstick Chomp" with your friends playing a game that normally involves some emotional juice, or with your class sometime. I have. The effect is sometimes "dramatic;" sometimes, not. 

There, of course, is a better way to do pronunciation!

Keep in touch!

Bill

Original Research: Closed access.
“Imitation inhibition and facial expression recognition: Imitation-inhibition training inhibits the impact of interference with facial mimicry” by Naoyoshi Matsuda et al. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society

More than a touch less stress in pronunciation teaching!

Maybe the biggest problem with pronunciation teaching (other than time, training and "bokoos" of counter-productive techniques) is  . . . well . . .  stress, one of the most, if nor THE most consistently reported factors affecting instruction from both teachers and students. Likewise, approaches to "de-stressing" the classroom almost always entail doing something with body, such as in "mindfulness," which is essentially, consciously focusing on something other than the brain in achieving relaxation and various kinds of attention. 

A just recently published study by Lu and ten other researchers at MIT, Somatosensory cortical signature of facial nociception and vibrotactile touch–induced analgesia, "touches on" the potentially powerful role of touch in mediating the effect of stress. (Let me translate that!) Touching, the face in this instance--by mice, moderates the impact of stress, touch-mediated analgesia. 

Now granted, generalizing from a study done on mice to the potential role of touch in pronunciation teaching is a bit of a stretch. Not so much actually. All pronunciation work involves touch, albeit generally without conscious, systematic attention, for example, clapping hands to holding objects used to

• embody phonological concepts, such as rubber bands with vowel lengthening 
• fingers touching the larynx for vowel voicing 
• focusing learners attention of touch between articulators in the mouth

Haptic pronunciation teaching in its latest iteration, The KINETIK Method, involves extensive use of gesture-plus-touch in all phases of the system. Research has long established the stress reducing nature of body movement and breathing, in general, but the contribution of touch, either in conjunction with gesture or in isolation, has not been researched in this field. In haptic work we have know for decades that touch contributes substantially to the process but it has been almost impossible to set up or successively carry out a study to exploring just to what extent that is the case. 

This study makes a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the underlying "wiring" between touch and emotion and stress. In particular, it confirms the importance of use of touch with gesture in anchoring rhythm and stress in instruction. For more on that see these recent blog posts: 

• This one on touch and link to sounds
• This one on the PTSD parallel .  . . 
• Your standard KINETIK course

As we always say: Keep in touch!!!

Source:

SCIENCE ADVANCES 16 Nov 2022, Vol 8, Issue 46
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn6530