Putting the festive and 'fʌn' back in (pronunciation) teaching and testing: The Taylor Swift effect!

Clipart: Clker.com

Following an earlier, tongue-in-cheek post on excessive "fear of micro-aggression" in pronunciation teaching, we have an almost equally "deep" (or surreal) potential antidote for the most obvious kind of macro-aggression: testing! Developed by a sociology instructor, Dougherty, at Baylor University (Summarized by ScienceDaily.com) the trick is basically just to bring in "balloons, streamers, treats and music" and call tests "Learning celebrations." There was a little more to it than that, of course--including making items on tests "amusing" . . .  (Of course, just not taking undergraduate sociology too seriously in the first place might be a good place to begin as well.)

But Dougherty does have a point--other than simply bribing students with sugar and creating an atmosphere of "unbearable lightness of being." My son tells a great story of one of his graduate instructors, a phenomenally good lecturer and world famous researcher, who would always serve students homemade cookies before handing out class evaluations and then would play guitar and sing to them while they filled them out--but noting up front that he was in no way attempting to influence their responses . . . 

Making learning fun works, but creating a test that is also a true, formative, fun leaning experience is extraordinary. From the summary, however, it is not at all clear how the sociology test actually contributed to the overall objectives and "delivery" of the course, other than a modest 2 point (out of 100) increase in mean score across semesters. 

I love my work; teaching, for me, is often fun. Making a class "fun and entertaining" is too easy. Making the intrinsic learning experience rewarding and perceived as "fun"--through what is accomplished or learned--is a different matter entirely, although sometimes related. That is especially the case with pronunciation teaching, where the basic tools of explanation and drill and controlled practice are often very difficult to enliven or make at all meaningful. 

In other words, if you can't figure out a way to seriously "embody" fun in the classwork itself, you can at least use Dougherty's approach--which is precisely what so many experienced pronunciation teachers do--especially those trained in earlier affective and holistic methods, such as drama, poetry and music: create a high-energy, fast-moving, entertaining experience to rub off on the grind of mechanical body work required. 

That "rub off" effect is now very well researched in marketing. You may have seen stories in the media where any product in close proximity to a life-size picture of Taylor Swift--regardless of age or whether or not the customer knew who she was--sold better, significantly.  

Your other alternative, of course, is just to "Be Haptic!"

Full citation:

Baylor University. "Tests vs. Fests: Students in 'learning celebrations' rather than exams scored higher and enjoyed themselves." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 June 2015. .

From warm up to wacky: Experiential learning and expressiveness in pronunciation teaching

This is a follow up to last week's post on a new haptic pronunciation teaching workshop we are doing this month at the BCTEAL Regional Island conference focusing on expressiveness. A recent study by Rangel, et al. looked at the interaction between instructor expressiveness and learner experiential learning style preference. (Hat tip to Mike Burri.) What they found, in effect, was that expressive delivery in training works well, or at least better, when the trainee is more amenable to experiential learning. 

Clip art:
Clker.com

What all of us in pronunciation work know is that you must engage learners expressively--or you lose them. Furthermore, getting beyond the basics is futile without something of that experiential "abandon" and receptivity. This is the conundrum: pushing learners beyond their comfort zone so that they can both understand and communicate expressiveness can be lethal. (It is the "Achilles Heel" of many loveable but wacky practitioners!) 

For that "expressive" instructional style to work requires a complementary openness to a less explicitly cognitive and more intuitive response from students. Here is how experiential learning style  is defined (excerpt from Rangel, Chung, Harris, Carpenter, Chiaburu and Moore, 2015. See full citation below.) 

 ". . . a form of processing that is intuitive, automatic and associated primarily with affect and emotional responses (Novak & Hoffman, 2009; Pacini & Epstein, 1999). 

 . . . the experiential learner typically demonstrates low(er) levels of cognitive engagement in the traditional learning process, and instead requires external, affective cues to effectively activate the experiential system and, thus, information processing. Such cues can be provided by one’s instructor when he or she employs expressive, stimulating delivery techniques." 

Does that sound like your typical (traditional?) pronunciation class or lesson? The problem, of course, is setting up the classroom experience so that effective experiential learning can happen, so that even the less naturally experientially-oriented learner can still join the party. 

Haptic pronunciation training is, by definition, highly experiential (as unpacked in any number of previous posts) and (should be) very stimulating, but why is requiring "uptake of" expressiveness, which requires more experientially-directed learners, especially at the conversational discourse-level absolutely essential? 

The Rangel et al. study points toward the answer: It allows more direct, albeit perhaps temporary, unfiltered access to the intentions and emotions being communicated by the speaker. Meta-communicative analysis can follow, of course, but the research would suggest that reverse is almost surely not the case. 

So how do you do that? How do you create an environment where experiential, expressive learning is not only tolerated but embraced by students, especially those in highly visual-cognitive career tracks? (Recall the great Nike commercial: Just do it!) 

One image that certainly comes to mind for me is that of a poetry instructor I had as an undergrad. She gradually enabled/required an extraordinary level of expressiveness in reading poems, where we all seemed to be completely at ease, uninhibited and "in" the experience. 

 If you have thoughts on that or references to published methods that do that quickly and well . . . please express them!

And stay tuned. We'll be trying out a new expressiveness-orientation model in the workshop at the conference. 

Full citation:

Bertha Rangel, Wonjoon Chung, T. Brad Harris, Nichelle C. Carpenter, Dan S. Chiaburu and Jenna L. Moore (2015 ) Rules of engagement: the joint influence of trainer expressiveness and trainee experiential learning style on engagement and training transfer. International Journal of Training and Development 19:1 ISSN 1360-3736, doi: 10.1111/ijtd.12045

9 ways to add more confidence to your pronunciation teaching!

There have been several earlier posts focusing from different perspectives on the role of confidence in pronunciation learning and teaching. Most of the research cited involved some type of physical action or physical response that functioned to make the speaker immediately more confident. You may start off with something of a gender gap, but here are some possibilities:

• You can create "Flow-ency" using one of the AH-EPS techniques, the Rhythm Fight Club.
• You can have learners strike Amy Cuddy-like poses or just move more confidently before they start speaking.
• You can make sure that learners are well-connected to their network.
• You can do some more work on basic phonemes  . . . 

  

  Clip art: Clker/
  Library of Congress

• Learners can lower the pitch of their voices.
• You can switch to being more of a coach than a teacher.
• You can get learners to be more physical or "listen to that voice in their heads."
• Learners can go to a proposed workshop at TESOL 2015 if they are Asian female professionals with accents.
• You can, of course, just get learners to feel better about themselves . . . 

Any other suggestions to add to the list?

Affective haptics

Clip art: Clker

In the earlier post on the upcoming 2012 Haptics Symposium, I mentioned the Workshop on Affective Haptics. Here is the note from the summary of the workshop:

"Affective Haptics is the emerging area of research which focuses on the design of devices and systems that can elicit, enhance, or influence the emotional state of a human by means of sense of touch. Human emotions can be easily evoked by different cues, and the sense of touch is one of the most emotionally charged channels. Affective Haptics is a wide interdisciplinary area, strongly related to such fields as multi‐modal interfaces, affective computing, neuroscience, psychology, mediated communications, telepresence, robotics, etc."

HICP work draws from most of those areas, even the last. Note the EHIEP logo, which draws something of its character from the robot-like control of the upper body required for mosts protocols. Keep in touch. 

How sound touches us

There have been many relatively recent studies of synaesthetic metaphor (combing senses, e.g., a moving speech, a sharp flavor) in various disciplines. In a 1996 study by Day, it was shown, for example, that in English literature, the dominate synaesthetic metaphor tends to be "sound-touch," such as a "piercing scream." In music metalanguage, the audio-tactile metaphors related to pitch, loudness and other qualities are so pervasive that it would be nearly inconceivable to speak of musical sound otherwise (e.g., G-sharp or G-flat).

The cognitive-affective-visual-auditory-kinesthetic-tactile "hexus" (see earlier "hexus" post) that is a word or sound in language can be  committed to memory or accessed in any number of ways, but that close affinity between touch and sound, both metaphorically and neuro-physiologically, is especially relevant in teaching pronunciation.

The EHIEP system, with about a dozen distinct touch types tied to pedagogical movement patterns that anchor L2 sounds and sound structures, is certainly a sound, touching step in the right direction . . .