KINETIK (Haptic Pronunciation Teaching) Method Certification Course

 Three ways to take the course!

1. (FREE) Attend the weekly Haptic(web)inars, Tuesdays at 6 p.m. PST. Learn one technique per week. Tomorrow is Week 2. The technique this week is the "TaiChi - Finger-flow-fluency,," a great procedure for encouraging overall fluency and integrating new or changed sounds into spontaneous speaking. To join, go to www.actonhaptic.com and sign up! 

2. Attend the webinars and also get the student training videos and teaching handouts. (at very minimal cost!) 

3. Take the Certification Course (available beginning August 1st!) Here are the details:

KINƐTIK METHOD™applies the basic Movement, Tone and Touch Techniques (MT3 - gesture plus touch routines) of HaPT to enhancing learning and memory for any class content and language, not just specifically pronunciation. It also promotes general intelligibility, using more pronunciation-oriented techniques. The haptic gestures serve to “complement” instruction in all skill areas, speaking, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar . . . and even pronunciation!

The course contains four modules, three lessons each. (Each lesson takes about a week to complete)

• Module 1

• Lesson One - Syllable Butterfly and rhythm

• Lesson Two - Finger-flow Fluency

• Lesson Three – Haptic phonetics: th/th, f/v, p/b, y, w, consonant clusters

• Module 2

• Lesson One - Single vowels, word stress, and word-final consonants

• Lesson Two - Double vowels and phrasal and sentence stress.

• Lesson Three – Haptic phonetics: n/ng, l, r, s/z/sh/zh, tsh/dzh

• Module 3

• Lesson One - Basic intonation

• Lesson Two - Advanced intonation

• Lesson Three - Baton integration and linking

• Module 4

• Lesson One - Advanced rhythm and fluency

• Lesson Two - Tense, unstressed vowels and secondary stress,

• Lesson Three – KINƐTIC review, advanced integration, and Certification test

The structure of a typical lesson is something like this:

(A) Attend the weekly Hapticanar on that lesson or do the video of it. (About 30 minutes),

(B) Do the training video for that lesson, the same one you would use to train you students (5-10 minutes, but you might want to do it two or three times),

(C) You identify a short section of a text of some kind from your current course content or a previous course, and figure out how you could use the MT3 of that leson with in a short embodied oral reading, usually about 25-50 words.

(D) At the end of the week, you meet for an hour or so with 3 or 4 other instructors like yourself, hopefully who are teaching the same type of students, and ME (or another experienced Haptician) to go over the Embodied Oral Readings that the four of you have come up with.

After Module 4, you take a REALLY easy little certification test where you create a video showing that you can do some of the MT3s and write up a couple of pages telling me how you would sell your KINETIK MT3s to your students, your colleagues and your boss!

The cost will vary, depending on how many students there are in a course. If there are 6 students, the cost will be about $300 per student. (There are a maximum of 6 students per course,) If there are 2 students, the cost will be $800 per student. Special programs are available for schools and larger groups.

For more information, contact info@actonhaptic.com.

The course will be rolled out in Auguet 1, 2021. It will be featured and discussed in Acton Haptic Community on Locals.com. Stay tuned here for more information as it is released!

Haptic Webinar #2: How can a little "TaiChi" enhance uptake and speaking fluency?

Come to the next Haptic(web)inar and find out! To get there, go to the website and register. While you are there, check out videos of the Introduction to KINETIK Method and Webinar #1: The Syllable Butterfly technique!  (And, of course, Keep in Touch!

A touch for teaching English rhythm and fluency

Clip art: Clker

A question in the hall at the conference yesterday woke me up this morning. Figuring out the neurophysiology of how rhythm is learned will be a major break through in understanding language acquisition--when it happens. At the moment, if it is systematically  part of instruction at all, rhythm is "taught" for the most part, inductively, through techniques such as identifying rhythm groups and then doing poetry or jazz chants, etc. In this research report from MIT, it was discovered that brain rhythms during habit formation differ radically from those evident once the "procedure" was initially mastered. In effect, during "learning" there is high gamma activity. Once the frenetic work is over; beta wave patterning dominates. Beta is the same pattern associated with meditative states of various kinds. Interesting. In the EHIEP system, the order of march of the syllabus and taught in the protocols is something like:

Warm up < (discourse prominence) < vowels < stress  < phrasal grouping < intonation  < rhythm < conversational "speed" < classroom integration.

Clip art: Clker

Wow. Rhythm is embodied using a pedagogical movement pattern based on a "TaiChi-like" set of moves that I first became aware of in Japan watching a group of seniors do TaiChi every morning in the park across the street. In general, rhythm is identified or experienced with structures of more than one focal or phrase grouping. And notice where that happens: after the "basic stuff" has been worked through. If you are working with a written conversational dialogue, that rhythm phase happens literally on the 5th pass through. (Discourse prominence would have been identified prior to the "Vowel" pass.) The felt sense of the TaiChi PMP is one of flowing fluency. (It was earlier termed the "TaiChi Fluency Protocol), in fact. Our intuitions were right all along . . .we just didn't have MIT behind us!