Getting a feel for pronunciation: What our pupils can tell us!

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What do you do with your eyes when you are struggling to understand something that you are listening to? (Quick: Write that down.) Now some of that, of course, depends on your personal wiring, but this new study “Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry” by Nakakoga, Higashi, Muramatsu, Nakauchi, and Minami of Toyohashi University of Technology, as reported in neuroscience.com, sheds some new "light" on how the emotions may exert influence on our ongoing perception and learning. Using eye tracking and emotion measuring technology, a striking pattern emerges.

From the summary (boldface, mine):
"It suggests that visual perception elicits emotions in all attentional states, whereas auditory perception elicits emotions only when attention is paid to sounds, thus showing the differences in the relationships between attentional states and emotions in response to visual and auditory stimuli."

So, what does that imply for the pronunciation teacher? Several things, including the importance of what is going on in the visual field of learners when they are attempting to learn or change sounds. It has been long established that the process of learning pronunciation is especially susceptible to emotion. It can be an extraordinarily stressful experience for some learners. Even when there are no obvious stressors present, techniques such as relaxation or warm ups have been shown to facilitate learning of various aspects of pronunciation.

Consequently, any emotional trigger in the visual field of the learner can have either "pronounced" positive or negative impact, regardless of what the instructor is attempting to direct the learners' attention to. If, on the other hand, learners' attention is focused narrowly on auditory input and the emotional impact, you have a better chance of managing emotional impact FOR GOOD if you can successfully manage or restrict what is going on in the visual field of the learner that could be counterproductive emotionally (Think: Hypnosis 101. . . or a good warm up . . . or a mesmerizing lecture!)

That doesn’t mean we teach pronunciation with our eyes closed . . . when  it comes to the potential impact of the visual field on our work. Quite the contrary! How does the “front” of the room (or the scenes on screen) feel to your pupils? Can you enhance that? 

To learn more about one good (haptic) way to do that, join us at the next webinars!

Original Research: Open access
 “Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry”.by Nakakoga, S., Higashi, H., Muramatsu, J., Nakauchi, S.,  and Minami, T.
PLOS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0230775

Font of pronunciation work? A difference that makes a difference.

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Research from several disciplines addresses the impact of font choice on everything from handwriting, to reading comprehension, to emotional reaction . . . to mediation of political perspective. Take a little tour through the pronunciation materials you have at hand. (If you are a "Phon-haptician," that has particular relevance, of course!) And then, read over the brief synopsis of font psychology as it relates to website design presented on TemplateMonsterBlog.

Most pronunciation change systems make explicit use of font design and manipulation, even if that only involves basic size, spacing, upper/lower case, super/sub-scripting, color, bold face, italics, underlining, etc. From a "haptic" perspective, the key is not just the impact of the visual display itself, but how that interacts with the rest of the multiple modality system. As many previous posts have explored, visual "clutter" can have a powerful, often neutralizing  effect on haptic anchoring of a word or sound.

Taking the TemplateMonster approach, the answer may be to figure out how to represent words graphically, probably in isolation for some procedures, with optimal emotional "sculpting." Hmmm. Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Which one you like? (Those are my only easy choices here!) Or do you prefer to create the graphic images in any of several styles of handwriting? With new computer interfaces that is a piece of cake now as well. As we design the EHIEP visual interfaces and student workbooks that issue is, understandably, very important.

From the research, your first assumption should be that your favorite font-age for use in anchoring work is very likely not the same as that of many of your students.  GIving them  at least some responsibility for and guidance in creating their own visual schemata for pronunciation change may be key. Our experience is that, for whatever reason, it does make a DIFFERENCE! 

Finding your "inner Spock" in pronunciation modeling

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Let's take a little poll: When you face your class, apparently it makes a difference whether you give them your left profile or your right, whether you stand to the left side (stage right) or the right side (stage left.) If not in the center of the front of the class, which side do you prefer? Right or left? According to Owen Churches and colleagues at the University of South Australia, Magill, "Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are each significantly more likely to show their right cheek than their left, while their colleagues in the arts and humanities are each more likely to show their left . . . " The author of the summary in Science Magazine comments further, "The study could indicate a desire on the scientists’ part to project cool-headed rationality." (There was no speculation as to what those in the Humanities, who tend to "face more to the left," might be subconsciously trying to communicate!) So, depending on what you are trying to project, whether "scientific," analytic focus-on-form noticing or holistic, whole-body integrated emotion-packed, expressiveness, you may be able to better project your "inner Spock" or "outer limits" more effectively. But seriously, where we position ourselves in haptic anchoring, relative to the location of the students does seem to matter. For example, we have discovered that you have to be within about 30 feet and probably in the student's right visual field to the extent possilbe, typically with more of your left profile visible. Why that should be the case is not clear but the fact that the left side of the face has been shown in numerous studies to carry more of the emotional content of the message certainly is relevant, as is the fact that the right visual field tends to be the "hotter" in perceiving emotion. If your students are not getting it lately,  it may be just a matter of turning the other cheek . . .

Vivid, emotionally-enhanced pronunciation instruction?

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Here's another one for the "Well-duh . . . " file. Researchers at the University of Toronto have just: " . . . discovered that we see things that are emotionally arousing with greater clarity than those that are more mundane," Furthermore, " . . . how vividly we perceive something in the first place predicts how vividly we will remember it later on . . . " They even have a term for it: emotionally enhanced vividness. There is a new acronym for us: Emotionally-enhanced, vivid pronunciation! (EVP) That topic has been addressed on the blog from several different perspectives. Now we have "empirical" evidence. Wow. Actually, there is something there worth mention, the use of the word "clarity" in that context--as long as you keep the terms "arousing" and "clarity" together. In other words, conceptual clarity must always be coupled with controlled emotional engagement--and even enthusiasm! Research has also repeatedly established that arousal, by itself, can also serve just as well to encode in memory all sorts of baggage that later interferes with efficient recall of specific targets in instruction--or life, in general. Emotion and attention management are key to our work, and pronunciation instruction, in general. For more memorable (and arousing!) lessons, try a little more (haptic-integrated) EVP.

Postmodern pronunciation practice . . . as therapy

The "clinical" in "Haptic-integrated clinical pronunciation" is key to understanding the focus and methodology of EHIEP (Essential Haptic-integrated English Pronunciation)--and much of what passes as pronunciation instruction in general. The central focus of Scott's 2007 article, Teaching as Therapy, is the postmodern replacement of the "moral" in education with "emotion," in part realized in the "hyper-individualization" of contemporary Western culture:

"Contemporary approaches to teaching (‘constructivism’), then, are not necessarily an educational cause to celebrate, or indeed the ‘reform’ that the dominant rhetoric paints them to be. Rather they are a remaking of education and schooling to match the ideals of the postmodernist (hyper-individualist) era, which, it would seem are neither better nor worse than what went before, merely different . . . the pain and uncertainty of the postmodernist project of self creation, with its heavy and inescapable burden of responsibility, goes a good way to explaining why ‘constructivist’ approaches are resisted by students. Sensibly, it would seem that they prefer to leave the responsibility with their teachers rather than to risk being found inadequate for the task of constructing themselves and their learning."

That we must now "manage" emotion in teaching is, as Scott later notes, both inevitable and predictable. But the degree to which we are actively involved in assisting students in "the task of constructing themselves and their learning" is the question--especially the latter. The EHIEP system does, from that perspective, depart from radical constructivism, exerting extensive and direct control over early pronunciation learning, including responsibility for moment-by-moment classroom instruction. 

Great, Scott! I feel better already . . . 

Smile your pronunciation frustrations (and anchor) away!

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Clip art: Clker

In a couple of 2009 studies by Foroni and Semin of Utrecht University, summarized by Science Daily,  it was demonstrated that " . . . merely seeing a smile (or a frown, for that matter) will activate the muscles in our face that make that expression, even if we are unaware of it." In addition, seeing or reading a word such as 'smile' or 'frown' influenced the subjects' rating of images that followed, e.g., a "smile" would result in a more positive rating; a frown, a more negative rating. Although details of the experiments are sketchy in the summary, they obviously controlled carefully the subjects' attention, eliminating visual and auditory distractions as much as possible. In that setting, the intensity of the somatic response in the muscles of the face was optimized, engendering something of the corresponding emotion. The parallel to haptic anchoring or anchoring of any relationship between the felt sense of the pronunciation of a word and its meaning and orthographic representation is striking, on a couple of levels. Just the set of words used in setting up change and practice lists of sound complexes impacts both the effectiveness of specific anchoring and the overall anchoring "environment" as it happens. No wonder learners so enjoy practicing voiceless grooved sibilants ('s'), once told to just "Smile when you say that!" We knew that. The researchers conclude that " . . . language is not merely symbolic, but also somatic . . ." and " . . . these experiments provide an important bridge between research on the neurobiological basis of language and related behavioral research." Really, ya think? If that isn't enough to make you smile--that there is finally empirical evidence of that "bridge," I don't know what is . . . 

"Integrative hypnosis" and mind/body pronunciation

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

On Badenhop's SeiShinDo website there is an excerpt from an interview he did with Melissa Tiers, an "integrative" hypnotherapist. Now to understand exactly where the two of them are coming from you'd need some background in hypnosis, psychotherapy, NLP, CBT--and SeiShinDo, but a quick read is instructive. Tiers talks about her four therapeutic stages of a session with a client and something about how she figures out which technique to use. (The "how" itself is fascinating, sounding very much like what I have often heard from highly experienced pronunciation instructors . . . it just comes to me . . . but I'll leave that for another post!) In essence, the four steps are: (1) identify the problem, (2) isolate the problematic emotional state associated with it, (3) identify another context the client associates with a more positive emotion, and then (4) connect up the emotion of (3) to (1). What is especially relevant to integrated pronunciation teaching is the assumption there that change must be (a) a multiple-modality, mind/body operation, that it (b) requires extreme attention (perhaps a little short of the classical hypnotic "trance!"), that it (c) demands some "out of the box" thinking at times, and that it (d) requires explicit, principled management of emotion. Now I am not necessarily "suggesting" that you get trained in hypnosis (or sign on with Charlie Badenhop for a little stress therapy online) but Ms Tiers' perspective, as one working "in the middle" of change, is near mesmerizing . . . (You may not remember this post, but next time you hear a the word "Badenhop" it will bring "Tiers" to your eyes . . . )