Full-body and voice burn out prevention workshop for language teachers!

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If you will be at BCTEAL regional conference on 11/16, please join Angelina Van Dyke and me for the "Full-body and voice burn out prevention warm up". (If not, it will be recorded and available off the blog shortly thereafter.) In all modesty, this will be a great session, not just because I'm in it, but Angelina, an accomplished concert and recording artist and voice teacher, has just finished an advanced diploma in voice science and will be sharing some amazing new techniques for "saving your pipes" as we say!

Here is the abstract from the program:

Feeling sluggish, stressed or caffeine deprived? This session, created by voice and pronunciation specialists for the language teacher (and students), should help. The carefully scaffolded, “restorative” exercises activate and focus body and vocal tract in less than 10 minutes. No meditation, medication or mendacity required.

My part of the party, body activation and preservation, takes about 15 minutes. Here is the list of the quick exercises involved: (Note: In some cases the name of the technique is more creative than descriptive, but you get the idea!)

1.     Mandibular massage

2.     Jaw shaker

3.     Neck slow header

4.     Trapezes circles

5.     Rotator cup “rolls”

6.     Hand/Forearm/Finger stretcher

7.     Shoulder and upper body boogie
7.5. Temple wings!

8.     Lateral leanings

9.      Glute Glutin’ 

10.   Core Belly Dance roll up (or plank or Dead Bug)
1.   Hip rotation girations

12.  Progressive lunge (with chair)

13.  Quads lifts (with chair)

14.   Hamstring swing (with chair)

15.   Adductor/abductor swing (with chair)

16.  Progressive mini-squats (with chair)

17.   Upper and lower Achilles tune ups (with chair)

18.   Calf and shin rock (with chair)

19.   Cursive ankle alphabet (with chair)

20.   Visual field scan and full-arm fluency (on the compass)

21.   Hyper lipper (8 vowel tour)

22.   Back and arms hyper stretch (3x) to vocal cone

23.   Chest and mouth hyper stretch (3x) from maximum pucker!

With the video you should be able to do both parts of the workshop any morning you need to get tuned up for the day. See you there or later!

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Mind-body Connections in Pronunciation Teaching

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For most, the systematic use of movement and gesture--or even haptic is now at least of interest (See, for example the work of Thornbury, Gilbert or Chan.) You really can't be very successful in this business without some somatic (body-based) technique to support or reinforce classroom instruction, even if that just means clapping hands occasionally to emphasize stress placement.

Show me an instructor who loves doing pronunciation work, however, and I'll almost always show you one who is at least an enthusiastic "gesticulator" but probably also a musician of some kind or avid exerciser! Every time I do that informal poll at a conference, the agreement is near 100% in the audience.

Still the best place to get a general understanding of the integration of mind and body in education and therapy is in psychotherapies such as Somatic Therapy: Somatic Therapy: Using the Mind–Body Connection to Get Results. (To access that 7-page primer, however, you'll have to sign on to Psychotherapynetworker.org; go to the "Free reports" tab and download a copy. No need; I've done that for you. I'll be reporting in later blogposts on some innovative and applicable techniques from that source.)

 It is instructive to read comments by clinicians who work in such holistic paradigms, especially to better understand why what we do works. In the piece, Wylie (p. 7) makes the following "prophetic"point--which applies to this field as well: " . . . somatic approaches may become sufficiently ordinary and acceptable that the line between “body psychotherapy” and “talk psychotherapy” may one day disappear entirely."

With emerging video and hapic methodology and technology, I'd only substitute "will" for "may"--and "very soon" for "one day!"

Just do it! . . . exactly as you are told! (Corporeal discipline in WAG and HICP)

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Here is a fascinating paper by Barker-Ruchti and Tinnin at the University of Basel looking at the place and effects of discipline in women's athletic gymnastics. (If your "Foucault" is not up to speed, spare yourself the read!) What it foregrounds is the set of sport and societal forces that demand absolute body-conformity in that or any other high level athletic performance. The nature of that disciplining of the body, and the attendant "mind and attention control" is very much of interest in haptic-integrated instruction as well. As sports and diet trainers all know so well, often developing a consistent physical exercise regimen (See earlier "40 day" post.) produces good "mental" discipline as well.

The EHIEP set of protocols forms such a framework. They must be done consistently, carefully following the prescribed patterns and homework assignment . . . work. (Typically about 3 hours per week.) In other words, the corporeal nature of the pedagogical system itself assists learners in being more disciplined in general with their practice and study. Just another case of the corporeal "tail" attempting to WAG the DOG-matic,  hyper-cognitive Western mind.

Body (and pronunciation) ownership and the rubber hand technique

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A recent study using the "rubber hand illusion, " demonstrated that schizophrenics have a relatively low sense of "body ownership," that is the subjects with the condition had significantly more difficulty in distinguishing between their own hand and that of a rubber "decoy" in their  carefully partitioned visual field during the experiments. One of the conclusions of the study is worth noting: "These findings suggest that focused physical exercise which involves precise body control, such as yoga and dancing, could be a beneficial form of treatment for this disorder."

The concept of body ownership (or optimal body awareness) comes up in several forms in other disciplines as well, from sport  to drama to stress management. The brain of the classic "type A" personality, one prone to be driven and "stressed" easily, is often characterized as having little connection to the rest of the body. (Re-establishing that connection is often the key to stress management, etc.) In my earlier work with moderating the effects of fossilized pronunciation, I was often struck by how many of my clients appeared to have little body awareness. Biofeedback techniques were consistently helpful in establishing workable "felt sense" of both body and pronunciation from which to begin the process of change.

Failing that, I might first send a student to a stress therapist for a few sessions, just to get things loosened up.  I like the parallel of "focused, precise physical exercise" being instrumental in establishing enhanced body ownership. If you are "of two minds" about haptic-integrated clinical pronunciation work, just do a set of HICP or similar exercises consistently and it will soon enough own you--and your body!

The "I" in Haptic-integrated Clinical Pronunciation Teaching

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We use "integrated" in at least two distinct senses. The first, the "gold standard" today in the field, is the curricular strategy of "simply" busting up the pronunciation class and then inserting its parts throughout the program and, ideally, merging the techniques with other skill-based procedures. (See the earlier post on the subject, linked to Grant & Levis, 2004.) Here is a brief article by Steed at the University of Sidney describing a possible/typical approach to integrating pronunciation activities and techniques into speaking instruction (including the standard questionnaire-based check with students to see if they feel like it "works.")

The other sense of the term integrated--what makes the HICP perspective unique--is the requirement for extensive haptic anchoring (using movement and touch along with speech and management of the visual field); and thus potentially much more effective encoding (integration, so to speak) and recall of new and changed sounds, words and processes. Note: The only other use of the term "haptic anchor" currently appears to be in cutting edge eye surgery. How appropriate that haptic anchors be "in the eye of the beholder" as well as the body!

Pronunciation change: The feeling of what happens

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One of the books (and theorists) that has greatly influenced my thinking on teaching pronunciation, and especially the benchmarks in the process from the learner's perspective, is "The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness," by Antonio Damasio. To wildly oversimplify Damasio's main argument: the "feeling" or emotion underlying a thought, in neurological terms, happens before words or images come into awareness. At the time of the publication of the book, over a decade ago, that was a more striking assertion than it is today, of course, but he helped establish (or re-establish in Western thinking) the role of the body and embodiment in consciousness. (Another of his great books, Decartes' Error, earlier set out the philosophical position.)

How that figures in to haptic-integrated, more body-centered pronunciation teaching is that it sets up learner awareness to recognize when a targeted sound is at least being mispronounced--and does it in a way that generally does not disturb ongoing spontaneous speaking. As most would recognize, once a learner begins to recognize or notice the "old" pronunciation in oral output, the "game is afoot" (to quote Sherlock Holmes.)

The feeling, or haptic anchor of the sound will often be felt or experienced by the learner, momentarily, after the "error" occurs--but not before, interfering with thought and conversation. That post hoc (after the fact) monitoring is nearly certain to happen if the anchor has been well established with touch and movement and the learner has accepted the suggestion (in the best sense of hypnotic suggestion) that it is going to happen when constructive change is "afoot!" So "suggest" that benchmark to your students, and see what happens . . . or at least get a feel for it.

Pronunciation (learning) posture

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In part because of the importance of upper body fluidity in learning the stress and rhythm of English (haptically, at least--see earlier "Fly Fishing" post), I have often recommended that a student with poor posture, often the result of an earlier accident or chronic work-related stress, do Alexander Technique Training (linked here and in the right column.) I considered the title, "Heading off pronunciation problems," for this post to set up one of the basic AT techniques, that of helping the student achieve such upper body relaxation that there is the strong felt sense that the head is "floating" atop the neck and shoulders, with optimal body posture and breathing.

In that frame of mind and body, attention focus and ability to mirror HICP pedagogical movement patterns should be heightened substantially--corroborated by research from many disciplines. So, if you are being "stiffed" by your students, perhaps you (or them) should "head off" to your local Alexander practitioner!

The felt sense of writing (speaking, listening and reading) with the body

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I think I missed a great workshop by Sondra Perl on writing with the body. In previous posts I have commented on the felt sense of haptic-integrated pronunciation work and the "full-body" or kinesthetic listening comprehension that gradually develops. If you can write "with" the body, you can obviously read with the body, as well. In part, that means that the writer or reader is intentionally trying to access and validate less conscious memories or perceptions of sensations of various kinds and integrate them in more effectively with conscious processing of the task at hand. (That is the essence of the concept of "felt sense" and the central concept of HICR/EHIEP instruction.)

There are many exercise, training and performance systems that use similar concepts and language.  Were I to attempt to identify the most pervasive problem with contemporary pronunciation instruction today, it would have to be either dis-integrated/decontextualized methods or lack of systematic "body" engagement. One or the other . ..  think I'll go with the body!