Mimic movement and pronunciation? Not always your cup of coffee!

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

That's right. Observed a great example of that recently at a conference. According to research by Ondobaka, de Lange, Wiemers, and Bekkering of University of Nijmegen, and Newman-Norlund of the University of South Carolina, summarized by Science Daily, it only works if your students have the same goals that you do: "If you and I both want to drink coffee, it would be good for me to synchronize my movement with yours  . . . but if you're going for a walk and I need coffee, it wouldn't make sense to be coupled on this movement level." Hmm. I can see where not being "coupled" might not facilitate a walk, but how about the impact of the same effect in pronunciation instruction, especially kinaesthetic or haptic-integrated work?

Previous blogposts have looked at a range of factors that may affect effectiveness of mirroring of pedagogical movement patterns, from personality, cognitive preferences and clutter in the visual field, to lack of achievable objectives. Orienting learners (and instructors) to why they should consistently "dance along with" the EHIEP  model on the video--or even the usual practice of mirroring videotaped conversations for fluency, is critical.

As one participant at our workshop commented, "This stuff is paradigm shifting!" (A common response, of course!)  Another participant, however, one who came in late and missed hearing the theory and "goals" of the workshop and left early, had a very different take. Later he told me apologetically--in part by his clearly unambiguous, uncoupled paralanguage over coffee--that it made "absolutely no sense, whatsoever" to him without "getting it all," up front. Q.E.D. (quod erat (non) demonstrandum), so to speak!

Correcting pronunciation: from mime to meme

Clip art: Clker

One of the best analogies for the felt sense of using haptic techniques in correcting pronunciation is pantomime, or miming. Some of the best video examples on Youtube are those of "robot dance." Unfortunately, I have yet to find a good one that does not have X-rated comments appended to it . . . So we'll have to settle for the text-based document from the drama club at UA-Monticello. It describes several of the basic mime moves that are used in training. Three or four of them focus on "box" structures that actually quite close to both the felt sense and the pedagogical movement patterns of HICP. The "meme" side of the process, to quote Wikipedia, " . . . acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena."

Following on the earlier post, by both instructor and student having developed a good felt sense of the sounds represented through PMPs, the feedback is "transmitted" more efficiently. What exactly do you meme in class? Could it use some correction? Try starting with mime . . .  Better seen; better heard.