Turned off by pronunciation teaching and learning? Good plan!

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Clker

Have for years, often in jest, pointed an accusing finger at the pre-frontal cortex as at least contributing to the difficulty that adults often have in learning pronunciation. A new study by Trafton of MIT (summarized by ScienceDaily.com) looking at the roles of procedural versus declarative brain networks and structures in learning language makes a striking point evident in the title of the article: "Try, try again? Study says no: Trying harder makes it more difficult to learn some aspects of language, neuroscientists find."

The bottom line: Declarative, more conscious networks work well (especially in adults) at learning vocabulary and understanding what is to be learned. Procedural networks are responsible for less conscious, more automatic (physiological) processes--such as many aspects of pronunciation, of course. According to Trafton (and many others) the answer is often to avoid "trying harder" by over use of declarative functions. How might that be done? According to Science Daily, again:

" . . . she is now testing the effects of "turning off" the adult prefrontal cortex using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Other interventions she plans to study include distracting the prefrontal cortex by forcing it to perform other tasks while language is heard, and treating subjects with drugs that impair activity in that brain region."

Got to get me a TMS machine . . .

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.