Bill Acton's Embodiment Blog: accountability

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Thursday, July 20, 2017

Students' pronunciation bad? It's important but not your fault!

Hot off the presses. Large scale study relating to what teachers think about teaching "pronunciation".

Clker.com

(The blog post was actually inspired by a comment from a neighborhood ESL practitioner recently.) Some conclusions, summarized by Science Daily:

. . . it's important that students have strong PRONUNCIATION skills, and they (teachers) have a role to play in fostering them.
PRONUNCIATION learning supports need to be personalized to meet students' different needs. A formulaic approach may not benefit all students.
. . . many educators do not have support or know how to allocate time to helping students develop PRONUNCIATION skills
Professional development and resources for PRONUNCIATION learning should be available to educators who will be responsible for teaching these skills
Many factors outside the school's control influence students' PRONUNCIATION learning, and it is not clear which interventions have the greatest impact on students. Thus, schools and teachers should not be penalized for factors outside their control.
(Paraphrasing here) Teachers should not be judged or evaluated based on their students' PRONUNCIATION.

I lied, sort of. Those conclusions come from a large study of emotional intelligence work in public schools in the US. I just substituted in PRONUNCIATION for SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OR INTELLIGENCE . . .

But the connection between social and emotional development or intelligence and success in developing adequate pronunciation in an L2 is well established in research in this field. I find the last two bullets intriguing. Evading responsibility for bad student pronunciation seems to be a standard (or at least implicit) objective in many L2 teacher education programs--and for pretty much the reasons indicated above.

Absolved of guilt and responsibility with lowered expectations, anything passing for individual intelligibility is fine. To paraphrase Gandhi's comment on Christianity: Pronunciation teaching has not been tried and found guilty (of messing with learners' identity, social and emotional development, etc). It has just been found difficult and not tried.

Or an even better analogy is the great scene between John Belushi and Carrie Fischer in "The Blues Brothers" . . .

I feel better already.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Fathering persistence in pronunciation instruction

Apropos for the day, a recent research study (summarized by ScienceDaily) by Padilla-Walker and Day of Brigham Young University on factors influencing persistence, examining the potential contribution of fathers to development of persistence in teenagers. The longitudinal study basically asked the question "Can your child stick with it?" and concluded the following about children who could:

[They] felt warmth and love from their father.
Accountability and the reasons behind rules were emphasized.
[They] were granted an appropriate level of autonomy [italics, mine].
[There were] above-average levels of authoritative parenting[italics, mine].
[The fathers] engaged in high quality interactions, even if the quantity of those interactions might have been lower than is desirable.

Research on adult exercise persistence has demonstrated similar principles of persistence but generally only in regard to the aspects of the learner's personality or the overall environment provided, for example, by the health club. I have yet to find a systematic study of the relationship between the leadership style (e.g., parent vs facilitator) of the coach and trainee persistence. Note the two terms in italics in the list: autonomy and authority. One reason that many have serious aversions to pronunciation work is that it requires all five of the above--but especially the exercise of both authority and (Here it comes!) . . . power. It simply does not fit well with contemporary learner-centered, non-evaluative and (overtly) non-directive approaches that can generally be very effective in motivating learners to do high level, strategic thinking and reading, general acquisition of vocabulary and developing fluency. (It did resonate well, of course, with the structuralists' drill and practice ethos.) Getting students to consistently and persistently do their pronunciation homework-and providing them with effective and systematic practice at the same time--can be enormously challenging. Are you comfortable with being more of an authority figure in pronunciation work? Apparently, you need to be . . .

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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.)