EAPIC Lesson 2 - Fluency (and rise-fall and fall-rise hacks)

Important note:  As of tonight, March 4th, only 2 people had completed viewing of the L2 training video, and none had enrolled in the course officially yet, so there was no feedback session this evening. I will wait a week before uploading the L3 training video, to give time for others to get "caught up!" If you have viewed the L2 training video, feel free to email me with your questions or post a comment on the blog below. 

                   

                               Lesson 2 - Tai Chi  (Fluency 1)

                                                                    

 

Link to the L2 training video         (Google meet)

Link to L2 training video  (Youtube) 

Links to  the L2 feedback session 

Link to L1 training video                 

 Link to Introduction video

Objectives:

• Basic rhythm and fluency

• Haptic conversation hacks: 

                    Tai Chi Fluency, RISE-FALL ( / \ ) 

                    FALL-RISE ( \ /) tones 

           Warm up! (vowel lip shape up!)

Circles        (3 sided) boxes

 u                        i          
 U                        I          
 O                       e             
 Ɔ                       ɛ
 ʌ                     ae
       a         a    

a > i     a > u   Ɔ > i

i > i     e > i    u > u    o > u 

READ

Tai Chi Finger flow fluency: both hands move in clockwise circles.

•     Finger tips touch very lightly on the most stressed syllable in the rhythm group.

•     Arms, hands and fingers—and whole body as relaxed as possible.

RISE-FALL and FALL-RISE tone hacks, using bigger circles and energy

Tai Chi (Finger-flow fluency)Training

• Fingers touch on the stressed syllable: X
• Hands move in (soft ball size) clockwise circles!

Nice X
That’s nice. oX
Very nice.  ooX
That’s very nice.  oooX
Easy Xo
That’s easy. oXo
Very easy. ooXo
That’s ve-ry easy. oooXo
Beau-ti-ful Xoo
That’s beautiful. oXoo
Very beautiful. ooXoo
That’s very beautiful. oooXoo
Fascinating Xooo
That’s fascinating oXooo
Very fascinating ooXooo
That’s very fascinating oooXooo

RISE-FALL and FALL-RISE Hacks

• RISE-FALL: Soccer ball size circles with both hands! 
• Meaning: Enthusiasm or excitement, with more voice energy
• 
  
• FALL-RISE:  Right hand continues upward a little. Left hand continues down.
• Meaning: You are bit curious or surprised about something, 
• or you are a Canadian* who sometimes uses a FALL-RISE + "eh" at the end of a sentence.  

Nice X          / \        \ /
That’s nice. oX / \        \ /
Very nice.  ooX / \        \ /
That’s very nice.  oooX / \       \ /
Easy Xo / \       \ /
That’s easy. oXo / \       \ /
Very easy. ooXo / \       \ /
That’s ve-ry easy. oooXo  / \       \ /
Beau-ti-ful Xoo / \       \ /
That’s beautiful. oXoo / \       \ /
Very beautiful. ooXoo  / \       \ /
That’s very beautiful. oooXoo  / \       \ /

Fascinating Xooo / \       \ /
That’s fascinating oXooo / \       \ /
Very fascinating. ooXooo / \       \ /
That’s very fascinating.       oooXooo / \       \ /

*We lived in Canada | for twenty years | and love a Canadian accent! 

 

Lesson 2 EOR - Ducks on a plane! 

(Tai Chi, plus RISE-FALL and FALL-RISE hacks)

MOOD: VERY enthusiastic! (On a very noisy subway where you have to speak loudly!) 

1A: ExCUse me. Could you put my DUCK | in the Overhead?

            X / \                                             X / \                 X \ / or /

   B: SURE. GLAD to. THERE you are!

         X / \      X / \           X / \ 

2A: Thank you so MUCH!

                                X / \

   B: You're WELcome. Where're you FROM, EH?

                    X / \                                        X / \    \ /

3A: JapAN| but I’m a STUdent here now. 

             X / \                 X / \

    B: JaPAN?  WHERE in Japan?

              X \ /       X / \

4A: SENdai.  About two HOUrs | north of Tokyo by TRAIN. 

        X / \                         X / \ or /                                   X / \

   B: That's a REally nice area. 

                        X / \

5A: It certainly IS. But it’s beCOming | very CROWded. 

                        X \ /                  X / \                    X \ / or / \

B: I've HEARD that. How LONG | are you staying in CAnada?

              X / \                         X / \                                       X \ / or / \

6A: PERmanently! I'm going to be WORking | in ToRONto. 

       X/ \                                                X / \                     X / \ 

   B: WELL. Welcome to CAnada, EH!

         X / \                           X / \         X \ /

Rhythm First: Haptic Side-Step!  (plus Tai Chi)

(For activation of the body, going from left to right, like reading a book!
Each time you do it you will add a gesture!)

A-B-C-D-E-F!

Homework;

a. (Every day): Warm up (L1 and L2), training (3 days), EOR, new text (day 5). Notes (new targets and observations) and log of time spent and when!

b. (optional) If you want to enroll for Wednesday feedback, email me for a quick interview on Zoom. 

c. Check out Legalshield and IDshield on my website: williamacton.legalshieldassociate.com (If you sign up for Legalshield or IDshield, you get 3 more personal lessons, too!) 

Keep in touch! 

Bill

wracton@gmail.com
https://hipoeces.blogspot.com/
www.actonhaptic.com
www.williamacton.legalshieldassociate. com

Getting in the right mood for enhancing your work (and even pronunciation!)

You "up" for a little meta-theory? 

Fascinating study, open source, published in Frontiers in Communication by Lai, Berkum and Hagoort: Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Here is the researchers' conclusion: 

"These results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sense making (P600) during discourse processing."

Not quite sure how to feel about this fascinating research at this moment . . . but it should interesting from some perspective, regardless of your general mood or affect as you read about it. In essence, what the research establishes, not surprisingly, is that if you are in a rotten mood at the moment you might be better at deconstructing what follows, identifying the fudging, etc. (As it turns out, the fact that I had just gotten back from a great run on my first read of the research report may have been "colored" by all those endorphins!)

The complete structure of the study is a bit complex to unpack (but you can here, however, or check out the Neuroscience.com summary). Basically, subjects attempted to identify different features of a narrative/story working within two conditions, one more emotionally "negative;" the other, considerably less so. In effect, mood did not appear to impact their ability to focus in on details but it did influence their success at arriving at an integrated understanding or interpretation of the overall narrative or discourse. 

Does that make sense? Of course . . .  So does the application of that work to pronunciation teaching! (Actually, it almost explains a number of things and people in this field, but I'll stick to pronunciation teaching!) 

There are number of pairs of binary (or false) conceptual distinctions that are of more or less utility to us as we sit down to work on a problem as heuristics or mnemonics at best where mood (in several senses) may figure in prominently, whether the mind set of the analyst at the moment or the degree to which mood (affect/emotion et al) is subsumed in  concepts involving attention to or focus on: 

• digital vs analogical 
• accuracy vs fluency
• segmentals vs supra-segmentals
• structure vs meaning or function
• sentence-level vs discourse-level context
• experiential vs cognitive/pre-frontal engagement
• affect vs metacognitive 
• particle vs wave/field analysis
• individual vs group engagement and learning
• local vs global constructs
• visual vs auditory
• learner autonomy vs learner indoctrination 
• critical vs inquiry-based thought
• conscious vs unconscious processing
• left vs right hemisphere-like processing

And how do or should those relate to (KINETIK) pronunciation teaching and learning? Not much, if at all. What contemporary neuroscience reveals very convincingly is that overemphasis on any of those earlier, simple binary distinctions, many of them but remnants or artifacts of earlier "science,"  especially in combination, can be fatal.

Ideas don't die . . . but people (and students) do. 

Bill

Citation: Lai VT, van Berkum J and Hagoort P (2022) Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Front. Commun. 7:910482. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.910482

Picture this! Affective use of smart phones in (pronunciation) teaching!

Clker.com

Tigger warning: The following post contains both fun and "happy talk" of various stripes!

Although the research on the effect (and affect) of classroom smartphone presence runs the gamut, from minus (BBC) to plus (Inside Higher Ed.), every new pronunciation textbook or system must be at least highly handheld-compatible or have its own app. Something apparently all studies to date missed, however, was to what extent using a handheld, especially taking and posting pictures, contributes to . . . HAPPINESS!

Chen, Mark and Ali, of University of California-Irvine have happily filled in that gap: Promoting Positive Affect through Smartphone Photography, linking happiness with use of selfies and shared photos. From the Science Daily summary:

Researchers collected nearly 2,900 mood measurements during the study and found that subjects in all three groups experienced increased positive moods. Some participants in the selfie group reported becoming more confident and comfortable with their smiling photos over time. The students taking photos of objects that made them happy became more reflective and appreciative. And those who took photos to make others happy became calmer and said that the connection to their friends and family helped relieve stress.

Without getting into the somewhat suspect methodology and conclusions of the research--which would obviously detract from the fun of drawing out the implications for pronunciation teaching (or any kind of teaching for that matter), let's just focus on a few of the more fascinating possibilities:

A. Selfie's promote confidence and comfort with one's own photos.
Teaching application: In addition to just added confidence, being more comfortable with "objectively" critiquing one's voice production, especially pronunciation would be for many learners exceedingly valuable. 
B. Photos of things that make one happy encourage reflectiveness and "appreciativeness".
Teaching application: Reflectiveness is now the "gold standard" for both learners and instructors. Just imagine the implications for instructor and course evaluations! In addition, some of the most interesting and productive work with smart phones has been with learners exchanging and discussing favorite photos where peer and self monitoring of language form and content is involved (See C, below, too.)
C. Photos to make others happy make one calmer and relieve stress.
Teaching application: Calm, stress-free working milieu is invaluable in pronunciation instruction but exceedingly difficult to maintain. The connection to the connectedness of the other members of the class is, of course, key. A good example of that is having students creating and talking about various kinds of photo collections, collages or web-applications that organize and display pictures with unlimited numbers of contributors.

Just doing this post made me feel, well . . . happier! There are, it seems, even more good (affective and pedagogical) reasons why students should be encouraged to use their smart phones in class! Get the picture?

Citation
University of California, Irvine. (2016, September 13). Study links selfies, happiness. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 5, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913173436.htm

Conducing feelings and emotions with vowels!

How's this for an opening line of a new Science Daily summary of 2014 research by Rummer and Grice entitled, Mood is linked to vowel type: The role of articulatory movements: "Ground-breaking experiments have been conduced (sic) to uncover the links between language and emotions." (Love that possible typo, "conduced," by the way--maybe something of a portmanteau between conduct and conduce perhaps? That actually unpacks the study quite well! To "conduce" means to "lead to a particular result." Science can be like that, eh!

Basically what they discovered was that if you have subjects do something like bite on a pencil (so that they come up with a smile, of sorts) or just keep repeating the high front vowel /i/ that has that

Clip art:
Clker

articulatory setting while they watch a cartoon, they tend to see things as more amusing. If, on the other hand,  you have them stick the end of that pencil in their mouth so that they develop an extreme pucker, or keep repeating the vowel /o/, they tend to see things as less amusing. 

So? It has been known for decades that vowels do have phonaesthetic qualities. (See several previous blog posts.) The question has always been . . . but why? The conclusion: Because of what the facial muscles are doing while the vowel is articulated, especially as it relates to non-lexical (non word) emotional utterances. Could be, but they should have also tossed in some controls, some other vowels, too, such as having subjects use a mid, front unrounded vowel such as /ae/, as in "Bad!"-- or a high front rounded vowel, such as /ü/, as "Uber," the web-based taxi service, or a high back unrounded vowel. 

As much as I like the haptic pencil technique, which I use myself occasionally (using coffee stirs, however) for anchoring lip position with those vowels and others, there is obviously more going on here, such as the phonaesthetic qualities of the visual field. Also consider the fact that the researchers appear to be ethnically German, perhaps seriously compromising their ability to even perceive "amusing" in the first place, conducing them into that interpretation of the results. 

 

Nonetheless, an interesting and possibly useful study for us, more than mere "lip" service, to be sure. 

In the mood to better manage the milieu during pronunciation work?

Photo credit: Library of Congress/Clker

Intuitively, everyone from marketers to mothers understands the power of music to alter mood and help manage behaviour. Some language teaching methods, such as Suggestopedia, have been very intentional in what kind music is applied, how and when. Previous posts have addressed the value of using music synchronized to movement in training and practice in kinaesthetic and haptic-integrated work. (Some of the EHIEP videos are being redesigned to be strongly music/rhythm-synchronized.)

Like many of you, I have experimented over the years with background or "mood" music in a wide range of classroom settings. In general, I think it is fair to say that it always "worked." The problems, however, were simply time and technology: time, in that it took so much of it to identify and prepare appropriate pieces and excerpts; technology, in that the equipment at the time was so cumbersome that often just the effect or distraction of operating the system during a lesson was enough to more than cancel out any potential benefit. (At one point I did have great system in a mammoth classroom with a 6-CD capacity that seemed to be very effective at times.)

A 2011 study by Jolij and Meurs of the University of Groningen (Summarized by Science Daily) again points to the potential of background/mood music in our work. That research demonstrates dramatically how music can alter perceptions and expectations--based not just on experience, but mood (affected by music) as well. Although the study itself was relatively simple, basically varying speed of identifying happy and sad icons, depending on background music, the underlying effect appeared to be strong. Now that the technology is readily available to quickly create collections of songs with seamless transitions that complement the tasks involved, it is clearly time to reconsider managing the milieu more systematically--with music. 

Making scents of haptic-integrated pronunciation teaching

Image: Mary Kay Cosmetics

Clip art: Clker

As noted in an earlier blogpost, I have discovered that having students rub in a little "Mary Kay - Mint Bliss" into their hands before we start seems to jump start things well. Now we have some evidence as to why that may work. In research summarized by Science Daily, Yeshurun, Lapid, Dudai, and Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel, report on the impact of associating a scent with a visual schema of some kind. What they discovered was that one's "first encounter" with a scent in that context persists strongly, even when other scents are later experienced in the same context. As learners tell me, the "message" of Mint Bliss is something like: stimulating, relaxing and energizing--not far off from what it says on the tube, in fact! (Yesterday, in fact, in the bag of free "goodies" at the TESL Canada conference was a little bottle of Aveda's " Botanical Kinetics" hand lotion.) Specifically, the impact of creating that kind of initial impression of what haptic-integrating is about can be striking and memorable, one that does seem to persist as the new research suggests. Does that make scents--something that you should consider when you "rub your hands together" in anticipation of pronunciation work? 

The music of (haptic-integrated) pronunciation instruction

Here is a set of musical terms which I have been using for some time to characterize the range of mood, expressiveness, affective setting and felt sense of various aspects of haptic-integrated, pronunciation work:

• abbandonatamente: free, relaxed
• amabile: amiable, pleasant 
• con moto: with motion
• andante: at a walking pace; i.e., at a moderate tempo
• piacevole: pleasant, agreeable
• a piacere: at pleasure; i.e., need not follow the rhythm strictly
• con anima: with feeling
• con spirito: with spirit
• liberamente: freely
• deciso: decisively
• energico: energetic, strong
• enfatico: emphatically
• espressivo: expressively
• facile: easily, without fuss  
• hervortretend: prominent, pronounced
• legato: joined; i.e., smoothly, in a connected manner
• leggiero, leggiermente or leggiadro: lightly, delicately
• mezzo forte: half loudly; i.e., moderately loudly
• mezzo piano: half softly; i.e., moderately softly

Taken together, that is provides a good impression of how the flow of HICP classroom instruction should be experienced. How might you label or describe in those terms your classroom pronunciation techniques and mood? Time to face the music?

Pleasant (physical) pronunciation practice

Clipart: Clker

Clipart: Clker

Do you generally associate the word "pleasant" with "pronunciation practice?" You should--or could--according to this Penn State University study of the effect of 15 minutes or more of exercise on mood. What the research revealed was that even mild physical exercise results in a temporary "pleasant-activated feeling" which seems to encourage one to keep it up. (Earlier posts looked at the factors involved in general exercise persistence.) Beginning the day or class with a body-based warm up which might include movement and stretching of not only the vocal tract but much of the entire body, for example, (See previous post!), should get things off in a better mood. Add to that various "pleasant"  pedagogical movement patterns accompanying presentation, review, anchoring and correcting of language being focused on in the speaking or listening class and both attitude toward pronunciation--and results can't help but improve. In other words, there should be a felt sense of physical engagement and "exercise" that is ongoing, especially in speaking instruction. That is clearly the case in most good public speaking programs, some even creating an almost dance-like mood to capture the dynamic of speaker and audience rapport and communication. In my experience, even coming back to haptic or just kinesthetic engagement intermittently during a lesson achieves much the same effect. If you do a bit of systematic choreography such that you have physically active anchoring near the end of the class in some form, the overall reaction to the work of the day on the part of the students--and myself!--will inevitably be more positive. Plan on it. 

Getting in touch with your inner fuzzy for pronunciation work--with touch!

clip art: Clker

In working with haptic techniques, one frequent observation will often be that even students in the foulest of moods seem more amenable to engaging with the procedures than were they being asked to respond to visual or simple auditory prompts. This 2011 study by King, NUS Business School, Singapore, and Chris Janiszewski, University of Florida, Gainesville. may explain why that could be the case: those in less positive mood tend to prefer tactile sources of comfort (such as in the photo accompanying the article of a small girl hugging a teddy bear.), whereas the more positive tend to select visual stimulation for comfort or stimulation.

What is of interest there for us is that successful haptic work should be less dependent on getting students in optimal affective states before the lesson begins. In other words (to paraphrase Arthur Lessac): hug (the body) first, dazzle ( it) later. Going back to an earlier post on learning potency, comparing "drill" to the "thrill," it may be that the experience of a "thrilling" pronunciation learning event feels closer to a great massage than it does to awe at the sight of a great picture.