Love it or leave it: 2nd language body, voice, pronunciation and identity

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Recall (if you can) the first time you were required to listen to or maybe analyze a recording of your voice. Surprising? Pleasing? Disgusting? Depressing? There are various estimates as to how much of your awareness of your voice is based on what it "feels" like to you, not your ears, but somewhere around 80% or so. Turns out your awareness of what your body looks like is similar.

A new study by Neyret, Bellido Rivas, Navarro and Slater, of the Experimental Virtual Environments (EVENT) Lab, University of Barcelona,  “Which Body Would You Like to Have? The Impact of Embodied Perspective on Body Perception and Body Evaluation in Immersive Virtual Reality” as summarized by Neuroscience News, found that our simple gut feelings about how (un)attractive our body shape or image is is generally more negative  than if we are able to view it more dispassionately or objectively "from a distance," as it were. Surprise. Using virtual reality technology subjects were presented with different body types and sizes, among them one that is precisely, to the external observer what the subject's body shape is. Subjects rated their "virtual body" shape more favorably than their earlier pre-experiment self-ratings presented in something analogous to a questionnaire format.

In psychotherapy, the basic principle of "distancing" from emotional grounding is fundamental; all sorts of ways to accomplish that such as visualizing yourself watching yourself doing something disconcerting or threatening to you. It is the "step back" metaphor that the brain takes very seriously if done right.

In this case, when visualizing the shape of your body (or your voice, by extension as part of the body,) you'll see it at least a little more favorably than when you describe it based on how it "feels" internally, the reason "body shaming" can work so effectively in some cases, or in pronunciation work, "accent shaming."

So, how can we use the insights from the research? First, systematic work by learners in critically listening to their voice should pay off, at least in some sense of resignation or even "like" so that the ear is not automatically tuned to react or aver.  (I'm sure there is research on that someplace but, for the life of me, I can't find it! Please help out with a good reference, if you can on that!) Is this some long overdue partial vindication of the seemingly interminable hours spent in the language lab? Could be in some cases.

Second, once a learner is able to "view" their L2 voice/identity relative to some ideal more dispassionately, it should be easier to work with it and make accommodations. That is one of the central assumptions of the "Lessac method" of voice development, which I have been relying on for over 30 years. It also calls into question the idea that aiming toward an ideal, native speaker accent is necessarily a mistake. You have to "see" yourself relative to it as more of an outsider, not  just from your solar plexus out . . . through your flabby abs, et al. . . .  My approach to accent reduction always begins there, before we get to changing anything. Call it: voice and body "re-sensitization."

See what I mean? If not, have somebody you don't know read this post to you again at Starbucks . . .

Original Source:
“Which Body Would You Like to Have? The Impact of Embodied Perspective on Body Perception and Body Evaluation in Immersive Virtual Reality”. Solène Neyret, Anna I. Bellido Rivas, Xavi Navarro and Mel Slater. Frontiers in Robotics and AI doi:10.3389/frobt.2020.00031.

The "kitchen sink" of pronunciation teaching and research

Have a little quiz for you. Before you read the rest of this post below the "bottom line," look over the list of activities from the description of a pronunciation/accent improvement course in a 2012 study by Mirtoska of South East European University, Tetovo, Macedonia. It is reported to have included, (a) awareness raising activities, (b) pronunciation coaching by native speakers, and (c) authentic language exposure activities, including:

• a semester-long course, "Phonetics and phonology," prior to the study
• peer presentations
• role plays
• series quizzes (based on watching "Desperate Housewives" as homework)
• segmental and suprasegmental teaching and activities using the book “Pronounce it perfectly in English,” among other books 
• (oral) reading activities
• Smith/Beckman (2005) Noticing-Reformulation task work

Question: Assuming that the activities were reasonably appropriate for the (college student) English BA student population in Albania, does that not sound like a great set of procedures?
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Of course, it does. The problem in this case--as in almost all class-room based pronunciation teaching research--is that the report in the article gives us not a clue as to how much of any of those procedures were done or how effectively they were done. In fairness, the focus of the research was not specifically on what works but does anything work in that context to improve pronunciation.

The results of the study are fascinating. With all of that great looking, "theoretically state of the art" instruction, the control group did about as well as the experimental group. "Both groups were pre- and post recorded over a period of one semester which is approximately 4 months at this university. The participants were recorded before (and after) the semester . . . using a test consisting of three parts; spontaneous speech, for which they answered three questions, reading a paragraph out loud and reading tongue twisters." Both groups demonstrated about equal, yet statistically significant improvement in "accent" by those measures. 

Credit: bclocalnews.com

Why? What may have helped improve pronunciation (or why the control group did so well) could not be factored out or even speculated on. That is actually not a bad picture of the "State of the art" today in the field. In controlled experiments, it is now well established that pronunciation teaching can make a difference. (What a relief, that "science" has at least confirmed that!)

Once pronunciation work goes into the classroom, however, the dynamic nature of that setting makes evaluating the effectiveness of any one or several procedures simultaneously exceedingly difficult. Fair enough.

So what is a practitioner to do? For the time being: Either throw in everything (that is theoretically or methodologically acceptable/correct at the problem) but the kitchen sink, as was apparently done here--or use a coherent system that embodies only essential, scaffolded, haptic-integrated procedures. I can even recommend one in fact . . . (AH-EPS, v2.0 will be available soon.)

Next post will look at how to evaluate a pronunciation teaching system--and how not to. Keep in touch.

No native-speaker models for pronunciation teaching allowed? Rats!

Clip art: Clker

For a number of reasons, the native speaker as model (or target) for L2 pronunciation or accent has been displaced by most contemporary theorists and methodologists--but probably not by most classroom instructors and learners. At least not yet. The reality that one will not "get there," along with the cultural-political-psychological-pedagogical-historical baggage the native speaker model carries has become sufficient grounds to dismiss it.

Research by by Graybiel and Turney at MIT and Sandburg at Washington University of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research on the neurophysiological basis of persistence toward goal (by rats) suggests both just how critical a clear target is but also the importance of benchmarks on the way. One surprising finding of the research was the way brain dopamine levels reflected not just reaching a goal but the continuing awareness of being on the right course.

What does that mean for effective pronunciation teaching today? Creating good nonnative speaker and "near peer" models has turned out to be problematic at best. Although instructors may use recorded models that work, including themselves, there is still little agreement in the field on how to do that effectively. At least not yet!

The potential problem for the learner, of course, is not having a clearly discernible goal or model, irregardless of how unrealistic or culturally "incorrect" that endpoint may be. Both the general absence of workable targets and models, clear trajectories and achievable benchmarks--in most cases for theoretically valid pedagogical reasons--can easily leave learners not only without a plan but--short on dopamine, and consequently the motivation to stay at it.

So what to do? Haptic pronunciation instruction is a step in the right direction. In the interim, at least just keep in touch!

Good to great pronunciation: the "happiness" model

One of the most challenging aspects of pronunciation work is the "meta-communicative" function of appropriately identifying change and then predicting what is next. I was struck by the analogy between that process and aspects of this 2012 study by Sheldon of University of Missouri-Columbia (Summarized by Science Daily) that suggests that sustaining happiness involves two main factors: " . . .   the need to keep having new and positive life-changing experiences and the need to keep appreciating what you already have and not want more too soon." (The validity of the study may, of course, be compromised by the fact that it involved 481 subjects living in the Riverside, California area . . . )

The criteria underlying that definition of "happiness" are wonderfully revealing, culturally "Californian" and near debilitating. Evolving pronunciation may not be correlated with many positive "life-changing" experiences, but the question of instructor and learner awareness of what the process is and how it is going is often crucial, especially at points such as the move from "good to great." (Collins' 2005 book, Good to Great, a business classic, describes that general threshold well.) In other words, it is often not the target that is the problem, but the surreal expectations involved. Western teaching methodology in general too easily relies on motivation to finish the job--or take responsibility for failure.  

There was a time, of course, when the bar of native speaker-like pronunciation was set impossibly high--for any number of reasons-- but at least it did give one a scale to work with.  But now that at least some (informed theorists and teachers) have accepted the target of "intelligible" speech, it has become easier to "appreciate what you have and not want more . . . " 

Clip art: Clker

Until there is considerably more change in societal attitudes and human nature, however, problematic pronunciation may still interfere with the need for positive, life-changing experiences, like going from a good job to a great one--or from English class to any job. You and your students happy with that? If not, what do you expect? More importantly, what do you expect them to expect?