Now we are REALLY talking (with students about pragmatics with meta-pragmatics!)

More big news! Our latest research report, our second, "Role-play and dialogic meta-pragmatics in developing and assessing pragmatic competence," is now officially in press with Pedagogical Linguistics, coming out later this fall, hopefully! Here is the abstract: 

Role-play as a bridging and integrating practice in language teaching and development of pragmatic competence in learners is well-established. In an EAP classroom (Van Dyke & Acton, 2021) explored the impact of one fluency protocol, Cooperative Attending Skills Training, by which students were trained to listen attentively to shared personal stories, working toward more sophisticated strategies of conversational interaction. That system included dialogic, pragmatics-focused, spontaneous analysis and instructor-student discussion of interactional discourse features. With that experience, further modeling and conceptual input, participants in this study engaged in six role-plays, each involving a problem requiring pragmatic accommodation. The data from transcribed role-plays were analyzed in terms of pragmatic discourse functions and NVivo-based thematic threads. The generally successful application of the targeted skills and concepts by course end most likely resulted from the engaging meta-pragmatic interactions preceding the role-plays, and the formal and informal instructor feedback related to implicature, prosody, implicit understandings, direct conversation strategies, grammar, and vocabulary.

This is a follow on to the previous piece, probably the second of three or four: 

Van Dyke, A. & Acton, W. (2022). Spontaneous classroom engagement facilitating development of L2 pragmatic competence: A naturalistic study. Pedagogical Linguistics 3(1) 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.20011.van

As reported in a previous blogpost, we'll be doing a pre-convention institute at the 2023 TESOL convention next March in Portland, based on our research. By then the next phase of the analysis, centering on prosodics and pragmatics should be in "presentable form." See you there! 

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.

HICP/EHIEP PMP rubric

Clip art: Clker

Here is an (11 parameter) rubric for use in assessment of both student and instructor HICP work. The categories reflect a reasonably complete set of the skills and and features of pedagogical movement patterns (PMP) involved in basic EHIEP instruction. Typically, the rubric would be applied at the end of a session either by an observer or instructor, or for self-assessment of instructors in training. (To use the rubric in the eForm requires joining the Rcampus website--a good source of ready made iRubrics' e-rubrics and tools to make your own with, in fact.)

Is there a proven, better pronunciation teaching method than HICP?

Not, yet! There has been virtually no empirical research comparing pronunciation teaching methods in the last couple of decades. Linked is a widely quoted article by Derwing and Munro from the 2005 TESOL Quarterly special issue on pronunciation (p.387) that in part explains why:

Clip art:
Clker

"It is somewhat surprising that so few studies have evaluated the efficacy of pronunciation teaching . . . It is all the more remarkable because a popular current paradigm in applied linguistics is the assessment of various approaches designed to have an impact on learners’ productions in other areas of language development . . .We are not suggesting a return to a comparison of methods of the type carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, we are concerned with matching instructional content to ESL speakers’ needs. That is, we would ask whether the aspects of a learner’s speech that cause problems for intelligibility are the focus of instruction, regardless of the teaching methods employed." 

Do you get that? In other words, from that perspective, and I think that represents the general approach of the field, method in the current "Post-method" era, is (nearly) irrelevant--or there are so many ways that are seemingly equally effective that it probably makes no difference how, as long as you have the right what. The HICP/EHIEP perspective, on the contrary, is that the what is the relatively easy part; good advice on what should be taught for any given population is now readily available. The most pressing question today is how to best assist learners in getting and integrating new and "improved" sounds.

It is comforting to know that we don't have to prove the efficacy or superior effectiveness of HICP methods but we can and we will, nonetheless. Research in a wide range of related fields and several years of experience using it with many different populations suggest that it works exceedingly well. But for the time being, please do take Derwing and Munro's word for it--it's at least as good as any other method out there. Actually . . . there's no comparison!