One of the joys of teaching is all those times when you stumble on a wonderful technique . . . almost by accident, when the lesson that you designed goes way beyond your objectives for it. The research literature is filled with reports of classroom procedures that inspire/develop confidence, (cf. Cadiz-Gabejan, 2021 . . . but not this one in this field.
For you to be able to do this technique with your students tomorrow, I need to give you little primers on haptic pronunciation teaching (HPT) and Observed Experiential Integration (OEI) therapy.
HPT, basically, uses gesture and touch to enhance memory and expressiveness by generally having a gesture terminate on a stressed syllable where the hands touch. The gesture can have several functions such as rhythmic or intonation patterns, or specific vowels or consonants. (For examples of some of the Movement, tone and touch techniques, goto: www.actonhaptic.com/HaPT.)
One of the techniques, used to create the deep falling tone at the end of a conversational turn, for example, has the learner move one hand from in front of the eyes down to about the level of the solar plexus, with the eyes following. The voice also falls as low as possible, in some creating the "creaky" voice quality. One of the students, in working with the practice dialogs "discovered" that she felt more and more confident by using that move . . . beyond the exercises. Her general demeanor and speaking "presence" made that evident as well from that point on.
I had seen a somewhat analogous technique used about 20 years ago in observing psychologists working with Observed Experiential Integration (OEI) therapy, where the patient basically followed the hand movement of the clinician across the visual field, terminating about the same place, sometimes along with the clinician's voice, sometimes their own, but the effect was the same: a sense of calm and confidence. That location in the visual field, down and to the right, seemed to act as an anchor for a sense of at least temporarily closing down, calm or resting.
Many systems use similar anchoring for a myriad of purposes. In this case, we were working with a basic sentence-final falling tone--that just keeps falling until it "hits bottom." Have been using it for the last two years in various ways, such as short passages or conversational gambits, with pretty striking results Here is a short video clip from the KINETIK training video series. Give it a try and let me know how it works in your class (as I'm CONFIDENT that it will!)
v7.0 will be available sometime later this spring or early summer.
Keep in touch!
Bill
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