Blogpost #1000! - Gender discrimination in L2 listening and teaching!

How appropriate that the 1000th post on this blog is on the lighter side--but still with a useful "in-sight!"

Ever wonder why girls are better language learners than boys? A new study, Explicit Performance in Girls and Implicit Processing in Boys: A Simultaneous fNIRS–ERP Study on Second Language Syntactic Learning in Young Adolescents  by Sugiura, Hata, Matsuba-Kurita, Uga, Tsuzuki, Dan, Hagiwara, and Homae at Tokyo Metropolitan University, summarized by ScienceDaily.com, has recently demonstrated that, at least in listening to an L2:

• Middle school boys tend to rely more on their left pre-frontal cortex, that part of the brain that is more visual, analytic and rule-oriented--and is connected more to the left hemisphere of the brain and right visual field. 

• Middle school girls, on the other hand, tend to to use the right area at the back of the brain that is more holistic, meaning and relation-based--that is connected to the right hemisphere and left visual field.

Now granted the subjects were pre-adolescent. That could well mean that within a year or two their general ability to "absorb" language holistically will begin to degrade even further, adding to the boy's handicap. (Although there is still the remote possibility that the effect would impact girls more than boys? Not really.) 

Clker.com

Research on what is processed better in the left, as opposed to right visual field (the right, as opposed to left brain hemisphere) was referenced recently in a fun piece in Neurosciencemarketing.com, How a Strange Fact About Eyeballs Could Change Your Whole Marketing Plan: What public speakers accidentally know about neuroanatomy, by Tim David, that finally provided an explanation for the long established principle in show business that you go "stage left" (into the right visual field of the audience) if you want to get a laugh, and you go stage right if you want tears and emotion. (If you don't believe that is true, try both perspectives in class a few times.)

(Most of us) boys really don't have a chance, at least not in terms of contemporary language teaching methodology either! Not only does de-emphasis on form or structure in instruction give girls an unfair advantage, moving away from boy's preferred processing style, but where are left-brained (generally right-handed) instructors more likely to gesture and direct their gaze? You got it--right into the girls' preferred left visual fields.  And that is NOT funny!

So, lighten your cognitions up a bit, move more stage left,
and cater a little more to the boys' need for rules and reasons, eh!

The elephant in the room: Body awareness in language (and pronunciation) teaching

In the previous post, I mentioned that we are considering proposing a colloquium at the next TESOL convention (in Chicago, in March, 2018) with the title of something like: Embodiment and the body in TESOL. That could bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners, in addition to hapticians!

Now comes this neat little study of body awareness in elephants:  Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task by Dale and Plotnik of University of Cambridge, summarized by NeuroScience News. Basically, they demonstrated that elephants are very much tuned into the impact that their bodies have on their immediate environment. In the study, subjects were posed with a problem such that they could not pass on a baton with a cord attached to the mat they were standing on--without getting off the mat first.

To the apparent surprise of the researchers, that was a piece of cake for the elephants.

Body awareness is getting more attention lately, for example in discussions of  body image  by scholars and "body shaming", even at #Starbucks . . .

Clker.com

But now for the "elephant in room" that will be the topic of the colloquium: To paraphrase the title of the study: Researchers (and some instructors) don't know when (or how) their bodies are obstacles to effective pronunciation teaching. Not to pull the mat out from under current teaching methodology, of course, but the point of this blog for the last 7 years has been just that: systematic work with the body is ultimately the key to pronunciation teaching.

That almost certainly means the integration of "full body" methodology in computer-mediated or virtual reality environments. The technology is available to do that now, used primarily at this point in gaming, rehabilitation and the military.

So what do we mean by "the body"? Essentially, what is termed "embodied cognition", meaning that is based in some condition or movement of our physical experience. It can be gesture, posture or "regular" motion or movement in learning, but it can also relate to anything about the physical environment of the classroom, or the genders, identities or perceived body images of participants.

50  years ahead of his time, Arthur Lessac put it so well in 1967: Train the body first! Join us in Chicago (hopefully) next spring in passing on that baton! Something noBODY should miss!

Citation: University of Cambridge “Elephant’s “Body Awareness” Adds to Increasing Evidence of Their Intelligence.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 12 April 2017.
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Alexander Guiora - Requiescat in pace

Last month the field of language teaching and language sciences lost a great friend, colleague, researcher and theorist, Alexander Guiora, retired Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. To those of us in English language teaching, his early work into the concepts of empathy, "language ego" and second language identity, the famous "alcohol" study and others, were foundational in keeping mind and the psychological self foregrounded in the field. As Executive Editor of the journal, Language Learning, he was instrumental in elevating it to the place it holds today, the standard for research publication by which all others are to be measured.

Working with him, doing research as a doctoral student was a unique experience. His research group, composed of faculty and graduate students from several disciplines over the years, met every Friday morning. There was always a project underway or on the drawing boards. Several important, seminal publications resulted. Shonny was an extraordinary man. I recently shared the following with his family:

I think the great lesson we learned from him early on was how to be brutally honest--and yet still love and respect our colleagues unconditionally. All of us, recalling when were newbie grad students, "cherish" memories of being jumped all over for making a really stupid mistake-- which we would surely never commit again! And then, minutes later, he could just as well say something genuinely complimentary about an idea or phrasing in a piece that we were responsible for. Talk about cultivating and enhancing "language researcher ego"! He taught us to think and argue persuasively from valid research, how to not take criticism of our work, personally. Few of us did not develop with him a lasting passion for collaborative research.

9 ways to add more confidence to your pronunciation teaching!

There have been several earlier posts focusing from different perspectives on the role of confidence in pronunciation learning and teaching. Most of the research cited involved some type of physical action or physical response that functioned to make the speaker immediately more confident. You may start off with something of a gender gap, but here are some possibilities:

• You can create "Flow-ency" using one of the AH-EPS techniques, the Rhythm Fight Club.
• You can have learners strike Amy Cuddy-like poses or just move more confidently before they start speaking.
• You can make sure that learners are well-connected to their network.
• You can do some more work on basic phonemes  . . . 

  

  Clip art: Clker/
  Library of Congress

• Learners can lower the pitch of their voices.
• You can switch to being more of a coach than a teacher.
• You can get learners to be more physical or "listen to that voice in their heads."
• Learners can go to a proposed workshop at TESOL 2015 if they are Asian female professionals with accents.
• You can, of course, just get learners to feel better about themselves . . . 

Any other suggestions to add to the list?

In"gender"ing pitch and frequency change in (haptic) pronunciation work

Clip art: 

Ever wondered exactly when change in voice quality created by testosterone therapy during the sex change process signals the transition from X to Y or Y to X when making an 's' sound? (Now stay with me here!) There is a very interesting side to this study by Zimman of CU-Boulder, summarized in a CU-Boulder press release. (Actually, you'll need to keep wondering a little while longer . . . the summary doesn't say what the threshold is exactly but it does highlight the difference between perceived pitch and vocal resonance--and something of how it can be modulated.)

One nice observation: " . . . a voice could have a higher pitch and still be perceived as male if the speaker pronounced “s” sounds in a lower frequency, which is achieved by moving the tongue farther away from the teeth." And a second: "(Vocal) resonance is lower (that is focused more in the upper chest than in their sinuses) for people whose larynx is deeper in their throats, but people learn to manipulate the position of their larynx when they’re young, with male children pulling their larynxes down a little bit and female children pushing them up . . . "

In AH-EPS, rich vocal resonance, whether perceived as more "male" or "female," is essential for effective anchoring of sounds. (That may explain why new or vibrant vocal resonance is often experienced as representative of one's new L2 identity.) Here is one of the haptic video techniques used for enhancing "both ends" of the vocal resonance range. (There is some additional touch involved that is not immediately evident in the video.) 

Clker

Managing the frequency and tongue position of the standard, North American English alveolar "hissing" grooved sibilant ('s'), which helps separate it from "sh" and varieties of the sound that are considerably more fronted than in NAE, is not too difficult either, done "haptically." Notice in the video the effect of the technique in "pulling apart" 's' from 'sh.'  It uses the dynamic hand gestures and sensation of aspiration "touching" the hand initially, along with lip rounding and un-rounding, to guide the tongue either up and back or down and forward in the mouth. 

Does that resonante? If not, pick a different gender and do the videos again. 

A touch of gender in (haptically anchoring) English vowels

Image: Wikipedia

Image: Wikipedia

Grammatical gender is a prominent feature in many romance and germanic languages. In some cases there is a correlation between it and masculine or feminine attributes but it is as often as not just random. 2011 research by Slepian, Weisbuch of the University of Denver, Rule of the University of Toronto, and Ambady of Tufts University, summarized by Science Daily, ends in this "touching" conclusion: "We were really surprised . . . that the feeling of handling something hard or soft can influence how you visually perceive a face . . . that knowledge about social categories, such as gender, is like other kinds of knowledge -- it's partly carried in the body."

Ya think? Subjects basically held something tough or "tender" as they were asked to make judgements on the gender of people in pictures, and, not surprisingly the texture of the object affected their "gender detector," or something to that effect. As noted in earlier posts, in the EHIEP system, each vowel type as it is articulated is designed to be accompanied by a distinct sign-like touch that has very distinct texture. (See also earlier posts on the neurophysiological correlates of textural metaphors.) Turns out we may have unwittingly created masculine and feminine vowel anchors! No wonder they work so well!

• When marking/anchoring stress in words or phrases, (a) use rough GUY-touch for lax vowels in isolation or before voiceless consonants, (b) use tender/static GIRL-touch for tense vowels in isolation or in secondary stressed positon in words or phrases, (c) use gouging/dynamic GUY-touch for diphthongs and tense vowels + off-glide, or (d) use tender/dynamic GIRL-touch for lax vowels in stressed syllables before voiced consonants.  
• When marking/anchoring  the prominent syllable in a tone or intonation group, use smooth/gentle/flowing GIRL-touch!
• When marking/anchoring syllables in groups, use gentle tapping GIRL-touch!

Cultural body image in haptic-integrated pronunciation teaching

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

I am often asked if there aren't some students and instructors that feel uncomfortable with moving their hands, arms and upper bodies in anchoring pronunciation. There are occasionally. In previous posts I have looked at factors that may influence a learner's ability to benefit from haptic engagement and the kind of attention management that is involved. There is an extensive research literature related to  personality, body image, self-confidence, self-esteem, culture and gender. For example, this  MA thesis by Baird at Western Kentucky University  or this gender-based study of body image and self-esteem by Cheanneacháin and Quinn at Dublin Business School.  In our work, it is, of course, important to be alert especially to the cultural "gestural constraints and spaces" of our students. Over the years I have "discovered" any number of potential pedagogical movement patterns, especially related to hand movements across the visual field and facial configurations, that violate rules in some culture. In general the current inventory of PMPs has been thoroughly tested on all the main cultural groups that we encounter, but there will always be surprises. When we do encounter a  resistent or reticent learner the underlying cause of the problem seems more often to be related to the fit between learner's satisfaction with some idealized L1 "body culture' and his or her own. In the Cheanneacháin and Quinn study, the typical female-bias in terms of body image dissatisfaction was not evident; in the Baird study, it was the African-American males' perceived or identified fit to that culture's male ideal that affected body satisfaction and identity. Body satisfaction in full-bodied interventions (FBIs--see recent posts) is always a factor, at least initially. Time to hit the gym? (Consider taking a couple of your more recalcitrant students with you!) 

In-gender-ing pronunciation change

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

So which kind of learners, according to this 2006 study and this 2012 study would you guess would be the better at language learning in general or (haptic-integrated) pronunciation change? Those (a) high in sensitivity, warmth, and apprehension, and rely heavily on memorizing words and associations between them--or those (b) high in emotional stability, dominance, rule-consciousness, and vigilance, and rely primarily on a system that governs the rules of language? Assuming that personality characteristics should  make a significant difference, on the face of it, it appears to be a no-brainer. For general intelligibility, however, it seems to be a wash. Research runs the gamut from yes to no to maybe. There is no readily accessible research on variable success at approaching the "high end" in terms of L2 accuracy, where social integration and mastery of a wide repertoire of conversational and written styles come into play. Anecdotally, there may be some evidence that one profile may have something of an advantage there--but not in "regular" classrooms that present a more or less balanced program that is compatible with that range of personality and cognitive styles. (And I am not in the least interested in the question of the theoretical possibility of acquisition of a native-like accent. I assume that Scovel's offer of $10,000 still stands: to anyone who can bring him a seemingly fluent L2 learner who can pass for a native speaker, who has acquired English from scratch after puberty--who has no accent--even when stressed, sleep deprived and interrogated for hours by half a dozen speakers of different social dialects.) To quote my favourite quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell: A difference that doesn't make a difference, doesn't make a difference. Haptic-integrated pronunciation work done well must proportionally "embody" all those "characteristics" at different times, to differing degrees in the process-- a "marriage" of mind and body!

IN-"gendering" confidence before HICP work?

So, how's this for a conclusion to a study by Estes of the University of Warwick and Felker of the University of Georgia, summarized by Science Daily:

Clip art: Clker

 "Our research suggests that by making a woman feel better about herself, she'll become better at spatial tasks -- which in the real world means tasks such as parking the car or reading a map.So a little bit of confidence-boosting may go a long way when it comes to reversing the car into a tight parking spot."

In our work more women than men do have difficulty with the visual field framework  . . . of course in the field there seem to be about 5X as many women, at least in North America! Who'd a thought that all we'd need is some self-image work and a little extravagant praise to bridge the "spatial gap?" Try that first chance you get! If you are a non-male, I know you can do it! If you doubt me, try this app (one of my favorites, by the way) for a couple of days!