Bill Acton's Embodiment Blog: child L2 learning

Showing posts with label child L2 learning. Show all posts

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Keeping pace with PACE (with HICP)

Wow! How about a program that claimed to be able to enhance your child's (Excepted from the PACE website):

Auditory Processing: to process sounds. Helps one hear the difference, order, and number of sounds in words faster; basic skill needed to learn to read and spell; helps with speech defects.
Auditory Discrimination: to hear differences in sounds such as loudness, pitch, duration, and phoneme.
Auditory Segmenting: to break apart words into separate sounds.
Auditory Blending: to blend individual sounds to form words.
Auditory Analysis: to determine the number, sequence, and which sounds are within a word.
Auditory-Visual Association: to be able to link a sound with an image.
Comprehension: to understand words and concepts.
Divided Attention: to attend to and handle two or more tasks at one time such as taking notes while listening and carrying totals while adding the next column. Required for handling tasks quickly or tasks with complexity.
Logic and Reasoning: to reason, plan, and think.
Long-Term Memory: to retrieve past information.
Math Computations: to do math calculations such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.
Processing Speed: the speed at which the brain processes information. Makes reading faster and less tiring; makes one more aware of his or her surrounding environment; helps with sports such as basketball, football, and soccer and with activities such as driving.
Saccadic Fixation: to move the eyes accurately and quickly from one point to another.
Selective Attention: to stay on task even when distraction is present.
Sensory-Motor Integration: to have the sensory skills work well with the motor skills — such as with eye-hand coordination.
Sequential Processing: to process chunks of information that are received one after another.
Simultaneous Processing: to process chunks of information that are received all at once.
Sustained Attention: to be able to stay on task.
Visual Processing: to process and make use of visual images. Helps one create mental pictures faster and more vividly; helps one understand and “see” word math problems and read maps; improves reading comprehension skills.
Visual Discrimination: to see differences in size, colour, shape, distance, and orientation of objects.
Visual Manipulation: to flip, rotate, move, change colour, etc. of objects and images in one’s mind.
Visualization: to create mental images or pictures.
Visual Span: helps one see more and wider in a single look. Improves side vision. Enables faster reading and better, faster decisions in sports.
Working Memory: to retain information while processing or using it.

This is a long-established local private school. My guess is that they can probably do most of that, too! What is fascinating is that HICP/EHIEP work should explicitly attend to many of those (italicized) as well. Good multiple modality teaching and learning is like that . . . like this!

Thursday, August 11, 2011

(With Child L2 pronunciation learning) Haptic or not too haptic?

Clip art: Clker

In this study by Gori et al (2008) we get a glimpse into why children up to the age of 8-10 are more haptic in some contexts. For example, in determining relative size they will tend to rely on relative touch and motion; in figuring out orientation in space, more visual. Beyond that age, modalities are gradually more and more integrated. In working with L2 pronunciation of children with the EHIEP protocols it is striking (but from this research not surprising) how quickly they are able to "get" and mirror accurately the pedagogical movement patterns across the visual field and beyond. And, at the same time, they learn the haptic anchoring of sounds and recall them without the teacher even mentioning what is going on.

Later, as we have seen, as adults the senses are capable of working together or in opposition, depending on a number factors. To the old canard, "learn like a child," we can here see why it can be so difficult to get into that state--and how we may be able to construct frameworks that do allow occasional access to more uni-modal, direct learning when necessary.

Seen from that perspective, haptic is not just for kids.

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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.)