Recipe for curing (Chinese) distaste for pronunciation teaching

Have trouble selling your students on pronunciation, developing an 'appetite" for it? Research by Madzharov, Self-Control and Touch: When Does Direct Versus Indirect Touch Increase Hedonic Evaluations and Consumption of Food, summarized by Science Direct, suggests that you may just need to give at least the more self-controlled among them a "hands-on" taste of it to get them to buy in. To quote the abstract:

"The present paper presents four studies that explore how sampling and eating food by touching it directly with hands affects hedonic evaluations and consumption volume."

What they found, however, was that for only the high self-control, disciplined consumers that they perceived the food to be better tasting and they were disposed to eat more of it. For the other subjects (like me maybe!), adding touch did not appear to contribute or enhance either taste or appetite for the food samples in the study. Why that should be the case, was not clear, other than the possibility that in the less self-controlled consumers, the executive control centers of the brain were offline already in terms of the direct, unfettered attraction of FOOD!

A few years ago, had a visiting scholar from China here with us for a year. It took almost the entire time for her to get me to understand how to get Chinese students to buy in to (haptic) pronunciation teaching, specifically, but, in general, more integrated, communicative pronunciation work. My "mistake" had been trying to convince relatively high-control consumers of pronunciation teaching in this case, to first be more like me, less high-control and more experiential as learners.

It has always been a problem for some, not just the Chinese students, to buy into highly gesture-based instruction. But touch was another thing entirely. Most any student can "get it", how touch can enhance learning and memory-- and be coaxed into trying some of the gestural, kinaethetic techniques. Probably for several reasons, one being that the functions of touch in the haptic system are to (1) carefully control gesture use, and (2) intensify the connection between the gesture and lexical or phonological target, the word or sound process. Also, it was  (3) much easier to present the general, popular research on the contribution of touch to experience and learning, and (4) the concept of somehow getting a learner to work in their least dominant modality, a basic construct in hypnosis, for example, can be the most effective or powerful.

The assumption here is that the metacognitively self-controlled are less likely to be influenced by immediate feelings or impressions, but once that "barrier" is bridged, as touch does so effectively, the relatively novel sensual experience for them has greater impact. Think: men and the power of perfume . . .

In other words focusing initially on the touch that concluded every gesture made a difference. Have been doing that ever since. Students are much more receptive to trying the gestural techniques once they feel that they have sufficient understanding . . . and then once they have tried it, focusing more on touch than on gesture . .  they are "hooked" . . . being more able and amenable to sense the power of embodiment in learning pronunciation from then on.

If you have a taste for pronunciation work with Chinese students, what is your recipe?

Keep in touch . . .

Original Source:

Author links open overlay panel

Madzharov, A. Self-Control and Touch: When Does Direct Versus Indirect Touch Increase Hedonic Evaluations and Consumption of Food Journal of Retailing Volume 95, Issue 4, December 2019, Pages 170-185 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2019.10.009

(New) Haptic cognition-based pronunciation teaching workshop at 2016 TESL Ontario Conference

If you are coming to the 2016 TESL Ontario Conference later this month (November 24 and 25 in Toronto) please join us for the Haptic Pronunciation Teaching Workshop, on Thursday, 3:45 to 4:45. This will introduce the new "haptic cognition" framework for (amazingly) more efficient and integrated pronunciation modeling and correction that we have been developing for the last year or so. (See previous post on the applicability of a haptic cognition-based  model to pronunciation teaching in general.)

HaPT-E, v4.0

Haptic cognition defined: 

• The felt sense of pronunciation change (Gendlin, 1996) – somatic (body) awareness and conscious, meta-cognitive processing 
• Change activated consciously and initially through body movement pattern use (Lessac, 1967) 
• Haptic (movement+touch) uniting, integrating and “prioritizing” of modalities in anchoring and recall (Minogue, 2006)

Modalities of the model:

• Meta-cognitive (rules, schemas, explanations, conscious association of sound or form to other sounds or forms)
• Auditory (sound patterns presented or recalled) 
• Haptic
• Kinesthetic (movement patterns experienced/performed or mirrored by the body, gesture, motion patterns)
•  Cutaneous (differential skin touch: pressure, texture, temperature)
• Vocal resonance (vibrations throughout upper body, neck and head)
• Visual (visual schema presented or recalled: graphemes, charts, colors, modeling, demonstrations) 

 General instructional principles:

• Get to "haptic" as soon as possible in modeling and correcting.
• Use precise pedagogical movements patterns (PMPs), including tracking and speed in the visual field.
• Insure as much cutaneous anchoring as possible.
• Go “light” on visual; avoid overly “gripping” visual schema during haptic engagement.
• Use as much vocal resonance as possible.
• Repeat as few times as possible.
• Insure that homework/follow up is feasible, clear—and done (including post hoc reporting of work, results and incidental/related learnings).
• Use haptic PMPs first in correction/recall prompting, before providing oral, spoken model.

The elaborated, audio-embedded Powerpoint from the workshop will be available later this month.

KIT

The business of correcting and remembering pronunciation

Clker.com

Doing a workshop today on correcting pronunciation with Rebeka delaMorandiere, based on her recently completed MA Thesis at the BC TESOL annual conference in Burnaby, BC. The conference attendees are generally public school teachers, so the focus is on classroom correction strategies for key pronunciation problems. Will see about posting some version of the Powerpoint later.

One  new addition to the overall framework is the inclusion of a (somewhat) common sensical 5-point framework from Business Insider website piece entitled "5 strategies for remembering everything you learn". That, in turn, is based on a neat book, Make it stick: the science of successful learning that I have linked to in earlier posts. The key strategies, along with my read on the application to pronunciation correction, are:

• Force yourself to recall (Before you provide a student with the correct pronunciation, see if they can do it themselves first.)
• Don't go easy on yourself (Practice a new word or sound like mad, especially in homework.)
• Don't fall for fluency (Just because a student can recall the right pronunciation or you can get them to do it in class, don't assume that the change will take without practice and conscious work on it.)
• Connect the new thing to the old things (Very important to connect a corrected word or corrected sound to as many other words with it in it as possible. That can be done many ways, but it is generally essential for there to be consistent uptake.)
• Reflect, reflect, reflect (Especially with older learners, from middle school on, research shows that they have to be meta-cognitively in the game, managing at least some of their practice and exploring ways of improving at their own initiative, or you may be wasting your time.)

That is a pretty cool list. Using the 5 tips. see how quickly you can memorize it . . . and recall it later!

And, of course, keep in touch!

 

3D pronunciation instruction: Ignore the other 3 quintuplets for the moment!

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For a fascinating look at what the field may feel like--from a somewhat unlikely source, a 2015 book, 3D Cinema: Optical illusions and tactile experience, by Ross, provides a (phenomenal) look at how and why contemporary 3D special effects succeeds in conveying the "sensation of touch". In other words, as is so strikingly done in the new Star Wars epic, the technology tricks your brain into thinking that you are not only there flying that star fighter but that you can feel the ride throughout your hands and body as well.

This effect is not just tied in to current gimmicks, such as moving and vibrating theater seats or spray mist blown on you, or various odors and aromas being piped in, although it can be. Your mirror neurons respond more as if it is you who is doing the flying, that you are (literally) "in touch" with the actor. The neurological interconnectedness between the senses (or modalities) provides the bridge to greater and greater sense of the real or a least very "close encounter."

How does the experience in a good 3D movie compare to your best multi-sensory events or teachable moments in the classroom, focusing on pronunciation? 

It is easy to see, in principle, the potential for language teaching, creating one vivid teachable moment after another, "Wowing!" the brain of the learner with multi-sensory, multi-,modal experience. As noted in earlier blogposts on haptic cinema, based in part on Marks (2002), that concept, "the more multi-sensory, the better", by just stimulating more of the learner's (whole) brain virtually anything is teachable, is implicit in much of education and entertainment.

Although earlier euphoria has moderated, one reason it can still sound so convincing is our common experience of remembering the minutest detail from a deeply moving or captivating event or presentation. We all have had the experience of being present at a poetry reading or great speech where it was as if all our senses were alive, on overdrive. We could almost taste the peaches; we could almost smell the gun powder.

Part of the point of 3D cinema is that it becomes SO engaging that our tactile awareness is also heightened enormously. As that happens the associated connections to other modalities are "fired" as well. We experience the event more and more holistically. How that integration happens exactly can probably be described informally as something like: audio-visual-cognitive-affective-kinasethetic-tactile-olfactory and "6th sense!" experienced simultaneously.

At that point, apparently the brain is multitasking at such high speed that everything is perceived as "there" all at once. And that is the key notion. That would seem to imply that if all senses are strongly activated and recording "data" then, what came in on each sensory circuit will later still be equally retrievable. Not necessarily. As extensive research and countless commercially available systems have long established,  for acquisition of vocabulary, pragmatics, reading skills and aural comprehension, the possibilities of rich multi-sensory instruction seem limitless at this point.

Media can provide memorable context and secondary support, but why that often does not work as well for learning of some other skills, including pronunciation is still something of a mystery. (Caveat emptor: I am just completing a month-long "tour of duty" with seven, young grandchildren . . . ) In essence, our sensory modalities are not unlike infant octuplets, competing for our attention and storage space. Although it is "possible" to attend to a few at once, it is simply not efficient. Best case, you can do maybe two at a time, one on each knee.

The analogy is more than apt. In a truly "3D" lesson, consistent with Ross (2015), whether f2f or in media, where, for example, the 5 primary "senses" of pronunciation instruction (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, tactile and meta-cognitive) are near equally competitive, that is vividly present in the lesson, overwhelmingly so. Tactile/kinaesthetic can be unusually prominent, accessible, in part, as noted in earlier blogposts, because it serves to "bind together" the other senses. In that context, consciously attending to any two or three simultaneously is feasible.

So how can we exploit such vivid, holistically experienced, 3D-like milieu, where movement and touch figure in more prominently? I never thought you'd ask! Because of the essentially physical, somatic experience of pronunciation--and this is critical, from our experience and field testing--two of the three MUST be kinaesthetic and tactile--a basic principle of haptic pronunciation teaching.(Take your pick of the other three!)

Consider "haptic" simply an essential "add on" to your current basic three (visual, auditory and meta-cognitive), and "do haptic" along with one or two of the other three. The standard haptic line-of march:

A. Visual-Meta-cognitive (very brief explanation of what, plus symbol, or key word/phrase)
B. Haptic-metacognitive (movement and touch with spoken symbol name or key word/phrase, typically 3x)
C. Haptic-auditory (movement and touch, plus basic sound, if the target is a vowel or consonant temporarily in isolation, or target word/phrase, typically 3x)
D. Haptic-Visual-Auditory (movement and touch, plus contextualized word or phrase, spoken with strong resonance, typically 3x)
E. Some type of written note made for further reference or practice
F. (Outside of class practice, for a fixed period of up to 2 weeks follows much the same pattern.)

Try to capture the learner's complete (whole body/mind) attention for just 3 seconds per repetition--if possible! Not only can that temporarily let you pull apart the various dimensions of the phonemic target for attention, but it can also serve to create a much more engaging (near 3D) holistic experience out of a potentially "senseless" presentation in the first place--with "haptic" in the mix from the outset.

Happy New Year!

Keep in touch.

Citation:
Ross, M. (2015). 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences. London: Springer, ISBN: 978-1-349-47833-0 (Print) 978-1-137-37857-6 (Online)

Executive indecision: pronunciation teaching overthink and attention management

Clipart:
Clker.com

An essential problem in contemporary pronunciation teaching with adults (as opposed to children) is that it entails both highly "physical" and "cognitive" engagement. I think it is safe to say that most methods, as evident either explicitly or implicitly in available textbooks, leave the question unresolved by presenting both type of exercises and explanations--and letting the instructor and learner figure out how much of what to do when. 

Intuitively, we understand that too much analysis, explanation--or worry--probably does not help all that much in being able to learn how to pronounce or remember a sound or word. I have often poked fun at what I term the "hyper-cogs" in the field who overemphasize meta-cognitive side of instruction, that is insight, planning and explanation at the cost of sufficient attention to the physical side of the process. 

Now comes a fascinating study by Grafton of UC Santa Barbara and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University (summarized by ScienceDaily.com--see full citation below) that identifies the culprit: excessive activity in the frontal and the anterior cingulate cortices of the brain.

In essence what the study demonstrated was that those subjects who learned a task involving identifying patterns and responding by pushing a button FASTEST had significantly less "activity" in those areas of the brain responsible for executive functions, managing thought and critical functions. (Recall that Asher's initial interest in Total Physical Response teaching of language was based on the concept that faster learning was generally more successful as well.) 

There could, of course, be a number of reasons for that finding which probably involves overall mental functioning, but the implication for instruction is interesting: More efficient teaching and learning of skills that involve physical patterning, such as pronunciation, should consider carefully the balance of attention to executive functions (conscious analysis and explanation) and embodied training (kinaesthetic, somatic and tactile involvement). 

Probably the answer for us lies in understanding better the changing qualities of attention (awareness) in the sequential tasks of ongoing, moment-by-moment pronunciation instruction.  From our perspective, haptic work involves almost continuous attention to and monitoring of what bodies are doing during the lesson. Think of that as the baseline that explanation and reflection are then "added on to" and you'll be on the right track. 

Record one of your classes or segments of one and review it from that perspective. And, of course, keep in touch. 

Citation:

University of California - Santa Barbara. (2015, April 6). The brain game: How decreased neural activity may help you learn faster. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 8, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150406121348.htm

Play it again, SLLP! (Avoiding the 8 deadly sins of second language learning practice)

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Clker.com

With apologies to Humphrey Bogart, a good first question in a learner interview is something like: How do you practice your pronunciation or English? If he or she plays or has recently played a musical instrument or sang well, I will follow up with an analogous, music-based prompt. 

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Glyde at ultimate-guitar.com has a new piece on something like the "8 deadly sins of bad (guitar) practice--and how to overcome them," which applies beautifully to our work: (His specific "how to" recommendations have been omitted for the time being.)

• Playing instead of practicing guitar
• Focusing too much on new material
• Going through the motions. 
• Failure to break up large practice sessions
• Failing to avoid distractions
• Failing to avoid boring practice routines 
• Failing to set up a practice schedule
• Failing to apply what you know

Not sure that I have ever seen a better, comprehensive framework for embodied practice. I'm going to come back and look at how that approach works specifically in haptic pronunciation teaching. In the meantime, feel free to comment on any of those. 

And, if you are serious about getting even better results with a wider range of learner "styles" this year, just begin by candidly sketching out for yourself how/if your system avoids those pitfalls (or persistent SLLP ups!) -- and have a very good 2015!

 

Bill

Blocking poor (and improved) pronunciation with Mindfulness

Mindfulness is big. It is described a number of ways, according to Wikipedia:

"Mindfulness is a way of paying attention that originated in Eastern meditation practices."
"Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally"
"Bringing one’s complete attention to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis"

In earlier blogposts, I have focused on the possible benefits to our work of M-training. I may have been missing something . . . In a provocative 2013 study by Howard and Stillman of Georgetown University, (summarized by Science Daily) they conclude that:

 " . . . mindfulness may help prevent formation of automatic habits -- which is done through implicit learning -- because a mindful person is aware of what they are doing." 

Clip art: Clker

And in addition:

"The researchers found that people reporting low on the mindfulness scale tended to learn more -- their reaction times were quicker in targeting events that occurred more often within a context of preceding events than those that occurred less often."

The study is, of course, more complex and the tasks involved may not be all that analogous to what we do in pronunciation teaching. Nonetheless, the striking preliminary finding, that conscious, meta-cognitive attention to the ongoing learning process may, in fact, work counter to some types of "implicit," or body-based learning is indeed very germane. So, when it comes to pronunciation work tasks, such as repetition, pattern recognition, drill--and even haptic anchoring-- to paraphrase Nike's classic moniker, perhaps the secret is to: Just do it! 

At least something to be "mindful" of . . .

Stop correcting pronunciation! (If your students can afford it!)

Clip art: Library
 of Congress

Good post by Tabaczynski, Counselling Paradigm in Language Teaching that seems very in line with where the field, in general, is headed. Here is his bottom line:

"I would suggest that instead of correcting we simply provide feedback. Students, I would argue, need feedback rather than correction. . . . the idea is that the development of language is non-linear, dynamic, and emergent, a product of the interaction of several systems . . .  I suggest that the task of teaching is providing external scaffolding systems of ‘buckets’ to collect information and manage spaced out retrieval practice."

Just as an aside, what does "correct" mean anyway?  According to Merriam Webster's, a range of things, such as:

• to make or set right 
• to alter or adjust so as to bring to some standard or required condition 
• to punish (as a child) with a view to reforming or improving
• to point out usually for amendment the errors or faults of

Got to be a better way (or at least metaphor) than that! Simple question, however: How might such a "spaced out buckets" approach work for you and your students? 

It would, of course,  be one thing were your students to be working on their English near full time in an academic preparation program (EAP.) That is especially the case when most students have good financial resources behind them or have the academic training or guidance to manage their learning and work with "strategies"--or even have time to think about them (as are most of Tabaczynski's students and thousands in the developed world like them.)

But how about if you have only minimal time and training to assist with pronunciation or attention to form in general, your students are not really very--or at all--"meta," they can not even afford textbooks, and they are in a class of 50 that meets only an hour or two a week? Might you still not be (justifiably) tempted to "kick the bucket" in favour of more direct, traditional "pointing out" or "punishing with a view to improving?"

My point. Today, where learners can afford it--especially with computer-assisted and better trained instructor support-- things look promising. For those who can't or whose programs won't, as Tabaczynski argues persuasively, with the current additional cognitive overlay of underlying behaviourists' reinforcement, extinction metaphors and methods, they may well be even worse off . . .

The answer, you ask? Next post, I'll address one (moving and touching) solution to this emerging "rags or riches" conundrum in the field. Perhaps we also need a new mantra: Pedagogical Justice for incorrect Pronunciation!

Keep in touch!

Motivating pronunciation practice: Where seldom is heard a discouraging (or encouraging) word* . . .

Clip art: Clker

Following up on a recent post on the value of self-affirmation, or affirmation in general in learning, a 2013 study, "You Can Do It: the Efficacy of Encouragement in Motivating the Weak Link to Exercise Longer During an Online Exercise Video Game," by Irwin of Kansas State University, reported in Science Daily It. looked at optimal workout partners in exercise persistence and effectiveness. What the study found was that " . . . individuals tend to work out longer when their partner was perceived to be more skilled and was one who kept verbal encouragement to a minimum." (Bold face, mine!)

That should be the hallmark of HICP, especially when using haptic video in instruction. (See sidebar on  AH-EPS.)

How well encouragement to practice, do independent work and homework is consistently "delivered" in a course is probably one of the best indicators of the general method, approach and competence of the instructor. The important distinction there is between "getting students going" and "keeping students going." The first can be accomplished in any number of ways, from highly verbal and meta-cognitive (involving detailed planning, etc.), with all kinds of explanation and exhortation--to "direct orders." The second, ongoing directive engagement in the process, is in many ways another matter entirely, much more indirect, noncognitive, emotional and nonverbal in nature.

How is your method in that regard, partner?

And, of course, what do you say to that?

*The song "Home on the range" was in one of the course books + audio cassettes I was assigned to use when I was just starting out in the field. My upper beginner-level students loved to sing it, even though the materials provided almost no explanation of the vocabulary and cultural context. The students understood something that many in the field today downplay: there is much more to songs than words and "situatedness."  (BTW, the Youtube audio, with Pete Seeger singing the song, is a classic.)