One typical reason often given for not teaching pronunciation has to be something like: I don't feel comfortable having to be so outgoing and interpersonally "invasive" in messing with students' speech. Granted, many (if not near all) of the strongest proponents of pronunciation teaching, mea culpa, tend to be pretty far down the "extrovert" rabbit hole. In more traditional approaches to teaching you almost had to be to drive drill and other mindless practices with enthusiasm, motivation students to stay with it. Being around someone who is excessively positive and extroverted can also get real annoying, eh!
Turns out, according to a non-significant study by Qui and Ho of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, that all that extroverted talk and language may not really be contributing much to the process--a proposition that I, being an extrovert, endorse whole heartedly, enthusiastically! (but see below.) Based on a meta-analysis of about three dozen studies of extrovert behavior, they almost discovered that extroverts tend to use more "positive emotion words" and "social process words" than the rest of you. Taken from the Neuroscience News summary:
"Positive emotion words are defined by psychologists – using text analysis tools – as words that describe a pleasant emotional state, such as ‘love’, ‘happy’, or ‘blessed’, or that indicate positivity or optimism, such as ‘beautiful’ or ‘nice’. Social process words include words containing personal pronouns except ‘I’, and words showing social intentions, such as ‘meet’, ‘share’ and ‘talk’."
Then, their conclusion: "Our results suggest that positive emotion words and social process words are linguistic correlates of extroversion, but they are small in magnitude."
Really? By "small in magnitude" they mean their findings did not reach an r of 0.05 (0.069 and 0.077.) Normally, I don't report "near misses" like that, but since I like the conclusion, let us run with it a bit. What it "tells" me, is that what many see as the secret to setting up the most effective learning "atmosphere" in class, the use of "pedagogically correct" language that is generally positive, "grouply" discourse, does not depend on being personally . . . extroverted. So what does motivate (move) your students? You, your pedagogy or both? And how does that interaction really function in class?
We discovered early on that uncontrolled enthusiasm, as great as it is for getting everybody on board, is near toxic in working with gesture, easily letting things get out "hand" or of control or focus--and very likely pronunciation, in general. In part, the reason for that being that the learner's attention can go almost anywhere in the visual field around them, affecting what is remembered from the session, compromising attention to sound, for example. Research (and common sense) has long established that both positive excitement and negative stress can wear you out equally, take you off your game.
It's certainly about moving . . . moving learners to learn efficiently, metaphorically and physically. Try this: Evaluate your next three or four in-class or on Zoom lessons just in terms of relative quantity and quality of body movement, by both you and the class--a fundamental principle of haptic pronunciation teaching.
One great way to do that is to record the session and then review it with the sound off. (If you are interested, let me know in the comments section and I'll share with you a rubric for that that we have developed for teacher training.) That will seriously impact/enhance your awareness and work on screen. Guaranteed.
Achieving intentional, appropriate kinaesthetic engagement is critical in teaching with systematic gesture, as in HaPT. And it can't help but make you and students look and sound better as well!
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Bottom line: Being an extrovert should NOT be especially advantageous in pronunciation teaching, properly understood . . . like in the new (EXCITING!) iteration of haptic pronunciation teaching (HaPT.) I'm sure you saw that coming! Acton Haptic Pronunciation: Content Complement System (AHP:CCS) official roll out date is now 2/15/21.
Check out previous blogpost for more info on that. ,
Original source:
“
A meta-analysis of linguistic markers of extraversion: Positive emotion and social process words” by Jiayu Chen Lin Qiu, Moon-Ho Ringo Ho. Journal of Research in Personality
