HICPR: Getting in the right mood for enhancing your work (and even pronunciation!)

Monday, January 16, 2023

Getting in the right mood for enhancing your work (and even pronunciation!)

You "up" for a little meta-theory?

Fascinating study, open source, published in Frontiers in Communication by Lai, Berkum and Hagoort: Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Here is the researchers' conclusion:

"These results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sense making (P600) during discourse processing."

Not quite sure how to feel about this fascinating research at this moment . . . but it should interesting from some perspective, regardless of your general mood or affect as you read about it. In essence, what the research establishes, not surprisingly, is that if you are in a rotten mood at the moment you might be better at deconstructing what follows, identifying the fudging, etc. (As it turns out, the fact that I had just gotten back from a great run on my first read of the research report may have been "colored" by all those endorphins!)

The complete structure of the study is a bit complex to unpack (but you can here, however, or check out the Neuroscience.com summary). Basically, subjects attempted to identify different features of a narrative/story working within two conditions, one more emotionally "negative;" the other, considerably less so. In effect, mood did not appear to impact their ability to focus in on details but it did influence their success at arriving at an integrated understanding or interpretation of the overall narrative or discourse.

Does that make sense? Of course . . . So does the application of that work to pronunciation teaching! (Actually, it almost explains a number of things and people in this field, but I'll stick to pronunciation teaching!)

There are number of pairs of binary (or false) conceptual distinctions that are of more or less utility to us as we sit down to work on a problem as heuristics or mnemonics at best where mood (in several senses) may figure in prominently, whether the mind set of the analyst at the moment or the degree to which mood (affect/emotion et al) is subsumed in concepts involving attention to or focus on:

digital vs analogical
accuracy vs fluency
segmentals vs supra-segmentals
structure vs meaning or function
sentence-level vs discourse-level context
experiential vs cognitive/pre-frontal engagement
affect vs metacognitive
particle vs wave/field analysis
individual vs group engagement and learning
local vs global constructs
visual vs auditory
learner autonomy vs learner indoctrination
critical vs inquiry-based thought
conscious vs unconscious processing
left vs right hemisphere-like processing

And how do or should those relate to (KINETIK) pronunciation teaching and learning? Not much, if at all. What contemporary neuroscience reveals very convincingly is that overemphasis on any of those earlier, simple binary distinctions, many of them but remnants or artifacts of earlier "science," especially in combination, can be fatal.

Ideas don't die . . . but people (and students) do.

Bill

Citation: Lai VT, van Berkum J and Hagoort P (2022) Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Front. Commun. 7:910482. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.910482

1 comment:

Bill ActonJanuary 17, 2023 at 4:45 AM
I will be following up on this post next week, focusing on how this "binary/nonbinary" perspective underlies contemporary theoretical frameworks in the field and the significant operating principles of the KINETIK Method that follow from it.
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What is haptic pronunciation teaching?

Basically, it is using gesture, touch and movement to teach pronunciation of English (or any language). What makes this method unique is that it is based on controlled and systematic use of gesture in doing that. (Often the problem with gesture use in language learning is that it can be "crazy" or random or intimidating or inconsistent, or not well-developed and tied to clear outcomes.)

The earlier "Essential Haptic-integrated English Pronunciation (EHIEP) approach," now KINETIK, does a better job of enhancing presentation, modelling, feedback and correction. The method is simple and easy to follow. Once a 30-minute module is finished, teacher and students have a set of techniques to use in class anytime a pronunciation problem or opportunity comes up!

Haptic Preliminaries

I often begin workshops or papers with the comment that in about 40 years in the field I have had just one idea: that the systematic use of body movement is essential to effective and efficient pronunciation instruction. That has never been more relevant than today, with the general deemphasis on pronunciation and introduction of technology into the field. From both perspectives, the "haptic" perspective approach developed here offers great promise. I can at least promise you a "moving" experience!

What is the KINETIK Method?

KINETIK is the name of the new v6.0 haptic pronunciation teaching system. About six years earlier we were using the acronym, "Haptic Integrated Pronunciation for Other/Extended Circle English Speakers" (HIPOECES)--still there in the url of this blog!

Haptic-integrated clinical pronunciation is:

A different way to learn pronunciation, based in part on Arthur Lessac’s notion of “Training the body first.” It is also based on research in the use of movement and touch in learning and training. It:

Looks somewhat like a combination of aerobics, sign language and Taichi

Provides a basic foundation for continued, self-directed pronunciation learning and classroom instruction

Designed for use by relatively untrained teachers but appropriate for all teachers (and learners) of all levels

Focuses on pronunciation used in conversation (not all words in English)

Is a highly “brain-and-body-friendly” system that promotes efficient learning of integrated tasks in general

Designed to promote integrated classroom pronunciation instruction and enable integration of conscious pronunciation work into spontaneous speaking.

Introduction

This blog was formerly named: HIPoeces (pronounced 'hI-pƏ-cIs), basically an approach to teaching English pronunciation to speakers of "outer and expanding" circle Englishes (including that population commonly termed: non-native speakers) but also compatible with the use of local models other than simply Standard" American" or RP. Using Kachru's "Inner, expanding and outer circles" model to characterize the breadth of Englishes and speakers of those, HIPoeces (now HICP) systems focus on developing haptically-centered pedagogical models and methods which can be adapted for teaching the pronunciation of various Englishes as they are spoken and taught by "owners" of those varieties.

In theory, the underlying principles can be applied to teaching the sound system of any language. Most language instructors intuitively use a great deal of movement and tactile anchoring in the classroom. The essential question is how to use that resource systematically, especially so that those learners who are less "haptic" in nature are also "moved" by the method.

Simply put, the HICP model/method is based on the idea of speaking along with arm and hand movement, not all that different from that used in sign languages. Most movement patterns are taken from either typical classroom pronunciation instruction practice or from related fields, such as psychotherapy or sports.

Most blog posts link to research that relates to the general HICP model, that is studies dealing with the role of gesture, touch, movement, learning modalities, learning in output, use of the visual field in learning, and experiential learning.

DEFINITIONS:

"Haptic" techniques- procedures that involve both movement and touch (Obvious examples include clapping hands, tapping feet, or holding an object and shaking it to the rhythm of a poem.)

"HICP techniques" - procedures that are haptic and also explicitly coordinated with phonological structures and/or discourse prosody (For example, clapping hands on primary stressed syllables in multi-syllable words, or doing a dance step on key words in conversational turns.)

"Haptic integration"- The haptic dimension probably functions as much to anchor visual and auditory material as it does to assist the learner in getting the "felt sense" of the sound or sound process. Lack of integration into spontaneous speech being such a serious potential shortcoming of instruction, haptic engagement seems a promising bridge to more accurate fluency.

"Visual field" - in HICP extensive use is made of the visual field in front of the learner. (For example, a modified version of the IPA vowel chart is anchored haptically in the imagination of the learner, directly in front of the upper body, and used for several purposes throughout the program.)