Drawing on drawing to enhance learning of sounds and pronunciation

About 40 years ago, in working with dyslexia in the family, specifically elementary school reading and spelling tests, we stumbled onto the idea of, in effect, forming the letters of the alphabet for the words on the spelling list that week--with the body, in cheerleader or ballet-like fashion. Our "alphabeteer" became lightning fast. The technique worked well, or at least it helped.

Drawing on the concept of the "body alphabet", creating stylized body movement that iconically represented letters and sounds, we developed the haptic pronunciation teaching system, beginning in about 1985. New gestures were created that visually and somatically represented in tangible and recognizable ways, sounds, graphemes and a range of phonological processes, such as vowels, phrasing of syllables and intonation patterning. Those routines were intentionally designed to not carry common problematic social meanings, such as waving goodbye or signalling some degree of pleasure or displeasure.

Just read a remarkable piece of neuroscience research that seems to get at some of the critical, underlying mechanisms involved: Relating visual production and recognition of objects in human visual cortex, by Fan, et al. (2019).

Quoting the summary from Science Daily:

"As the participants drew each object multiple times, (line drawings of pieces of furniture) the activity patterns in (visual) occipital cortex remained unchanged, but the connection between occipital cortex and parietal cortex, an area involved in motor planning, grew more distinct. This suggests that drawing practice enhances how the brain shares information about an object between different regions over time. . .This means people recruit the same neural representation of an object whether they are drawing it or seeing it."

Especially for the more kinaesthetic among us, sketching, allowing the pen or brush, or the body itself a more prominent role in supporting memory can be wonderfully enabling and effective. One has to wonder, however, what we are doing to our collective memories and coming generations as we "hand off" more and more of our primary encoding and recalling to our essentially visual-auditory smartphone interfaces. Research on that question and the general interconnectivity between areas of the brain is extensive and growing rapidly.

The implications of that observation and many like it recently are paradigm changing. Much of what we have come to understand as relatively isolated sections and functions of the brain, and by extension our behavior, are really anything but. The bad news and the good news:

In effect, everything we experience at any given moment can contribute substantially to what is later remembered and recalled. We, as educators or influencers, are accountable for much more, but, on the other hand, we now have license to do more as well.

v5.0 of the haptic system is about to launch. It does more . . .

Keep in touch!


Full Reference:
Judith E. Fan, Jeffrey D. Wammes, Jordan B. Gunn, Daniel L. K. Yamins, Kenneth A. Norman and Nicholas B. Turk-Browne, Journal of Neuroscience 23 December 2019, 1843-19; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1843-19.2019

(Haptic pronunciation) movement training: mouse to mouth?

Clip art:
Clker

New study by Kording of Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, summarized by Science Daily, purports to show that " . . . computer use not only changes our lifestyle but also fundamentally affects the neural representation of our movements . . . " Really? The research compared the "movement generalizability" ability of heavy computer users with those who were not. Those proficient "mousers" were, not surprisingly, able to more quickly learn new mouse patterns.

What is of particular interest to haptic pronunciation teaching, however, was that after about two weeks of specifically designed mouse-based computer game playing, the former "non-mousers" had, in effect, caught up. Their brains and hands had achieved what appeared to be the same "broad movement generalization" capability. This helps explain a key phase or problem in haptic pronunciation learning--and suggests something of a solution. 

For some learners, being able to follow along with the pedagogical movement patterns (hand and arm movements across the visual field accompanied by speaking a word or phrase, concluding in hands touching on a stressed syllable) used by instructors can be initially difficult. In our experience it may take up to a month for them to be able to begin easily generalizing a movement pattern of a vowel, for example, in practicing pronunciation of new words.

There are any number of studies reported here earlier considering why that may be the case, from pedagogical to psycho-social to neurological. The concept of training learners to be better at learning movement first, in a low key, maybe even "fun" set of procedures, however, is intriguing. Whatever the cause, if "simple" movement training, rather than more radical intervention--or giving up in despair, can enhance haptic pronunciation learning and teaching up front, that is indeed big. 

Will try designing some kind of analogous "Mini-Mouse Module," or perhaps just require a few minutes of iPhone game work before or during class regularly to keep everybody up to speed!

 Keep in touch!

The pitch for teaching prosody first

Clip art: Clker

There are numerous examples of methods where either intonation is taught first in pronunciation work or shortly thereafter using techniques such as "reverse accent mimicry" or computer assisted verbal tracking or imitating actors without attending to the meanings of words. Anecdotally, they all seem to work. From a research perspective, intonation or pitch change has been employed extensively in exploring neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain "learn" and adapt. For most learners, mimicking simple pitch contours in English is not that difficult. If you examine student course books, what you find is that they all include pitch contour work but where it occurs and how much is done seems completely random.

A new study by Sober and Brainard of UCSF (summarized by Science Daily) of how song birds correct their singing draws an interesting conclusion: they fix the little mistakes and ignore the big ones. The Bengalese finches provide us with an intriguing clue as to how to organize L2 pronunciation work as well: begin with the easy stuff--not the messy articulatory problems or complex phoneme contrasts or conflicts. The arguments for establishing prosody (intonation, rhythm and stress) first are compelling at one level (theoretically) but from the perspective of measuring tangible progress, it is still difficult at best to demonstrate what has been learned, given the tools we have available today.

Children clearly learn prosody first. (In the EHIEP system intonation is now in module four but I am considering introducing it earlier, in part based on this research.) Practically speaking, doing early prosody work is relatively straightforward and not costly. You can do it for a song, in fact.  

Plastic Brain . . . Pronunciation Change

Clip art: Clker

One of the most striking findings of recent research, such as this 2002 one by on neuroplasticity in motor learning by Ungerleider, Doyon and Karni is not just how the brain works but its inherent plasticity in many respects, its ability to reorganize and relearn or learn in other ways if necessary. One obvious implication of that is that just because students have individual preferences for particular learning styles does not mean they can not, in many cases rather easily, switch to other styles or develop better use of secondary preferences. The danger of cognitive style or learning style categories is . .. that they are categorical. Once we "know" what we are, that's it. (In fact, research suggests that once you know your style, especially based on some simpleminded 5-minute questionnaire,  you become even moreso--one of the basic assumptions of hypnotherapy, of course.)

Bottom line here: even the "adult brain" (and this is especially good news for learners of my generation and beyond) is capable of enormous flexibility and re-generation. So forget all that nonsense that you have heard about having to alter your teaching style to fit those of your students: retrain them instead! Well, actually, you should be constantly training everybody, yourself included, in multiple modality learning. Get HIP(oeces), eh!