I like the way you move there! (Why haptic pronunciation teaching is so attractive!)

Do you like your students? Really? If you do, can they tell? If you don't, do they know? Do you like
teaching pronunciation? Does it show?

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If your answer to any of those 6 questions is "I don't know . . . ,"  A meta-analytic investigation of the relation between interpersonal attraction and enacted behavior, by Montoya, Matthew; Kershaw and Prosser, summarized by Neurosciencenews.com, may be of interest. What they did is look at a bunch of studies, done on "hundreds" of cultures, trying to find universally recognized human behaviors that signal attraction (e.g., I like you!) Those nonverbal behaviors that (they claim) are universal are: 

• Smiling
• Eye contact
• Proximity (getting close in space)
• Laughter

Now, of course, how those behaviors are actually conveyed in different cultures may be quite different, but it is a fascinating claim. The summary goes on: 

"Other behaviors showed no evidence of being related to liking, including when someone flips their hair, lifts their eyebrows, uses gestures, tilts their head, primps their clothes, maintains open body posture or leans in." (Some of those at least intuitively seem to be related to attraction, at least in North American or Northern European cultures.)

One of the other, most striking findings (to me, at least) is that mimicking (or mirroring) and head nods were only associated with attraction in English. In other words, if your nonverbal messaging or expectations of students in the classroom relies to any extent on mirroring (of you or of your mirroring of them) or head nodding--and for the native English speaking instructor it certainly will to some degree--there can be a very real affective mismatch. 

Any native English speaker who has taught in Japan, for instance, can easily have their perception of audience engagement scrambled initially, when those in the audience sit (apparently) very still, with less body movement or mirroring, and nod heads for reasons other than just understanding or attraction. 

The intriguing implication of that research, in terms of haptic pronunciation teaching and training, is that both head nods and mirroring figure in very prominently in the teaching methodology, in effect making it perhaps even more "English-centric" than we had imagined. In most instances of modeling or correction of pronunciation, for example, a student "invited" to synchronize his or her upper body movement with the instructor or other students, as they repeat the targeted word, phrase or clause together. Likewise, upper torso movement in English and in the haptic system accompanies or drives head nodding, often referred to as upper torso nods, in fact.

In other words, the basic pedagogical process of haptic pronunciation work is, itself, "attractive," involving nonverbal "synchronization" of head and body in ways that enable acquisition of at least English. The only other language that we have done some work in to date is Spanish, but its "body language" is, of course, closely related to English. 

Even if you are not entirely "attracted" to haptic yet, this research certainly lends more support for the use of mirroring in English language instruction, especially pronunciation. (Nod if you agree!)



Source:
“A meta-analytic investigation of the relation between interpersonal attraction and enacted behavior” by Montoya, R. Matthew; Kershaw, Christine; & Prosser, Julie L. in Psychological Bulleting. Published May 8 2018. doi:10.1037/bul0000148

The elephant in the room: Body awareness in language (and pronunciation) teaching

In the previous post, I mentioned that we are considering proposing a colloquium at the next TESOL convention (in Chicago, in March, 2018) with the title of something like: Embodiment and the body in TESOL. That could bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners, in addition to hapticians!

Now comes this neat little study of body awareness in elephants:  Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task by Dale and Plotnik of University of Cambridge, summarized by NeuroScience News. Basically, they demonstrated that elephants are very much tuned into the impact that their bodies have on their immediate environment. In the study, subjects were posed with a problem such that they could not pass on a baton with a cord attached to the mat they were standing on--without getting off the mat first.

To the apparent surprise of the researchers, that was a piece of cake for the elephants.

Body awareness is getting more attention lately, for example in discussions of  body image  by scholars and "body shaming", even at #Starbucks . . .

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But now for the "elephant in room" that will be the topic of the colloquium: To paraphrase the title of the study: Researchers (and some instructors) don't know when (or how) their bodies are obstacles to effective pronunciation teaching. Not to pull the mat out from under current teaching methodology, of course, but the point of this blog for the last 7 years has been just that: systematic work with the body is ultimately the key to pronunciation teaching.

That almost certainly means the integration of "full body" methodology in computer-mediated or virtual reality environments. The technology is available to do that now, used primarily at this point in gaming, rehabilitation and the military.

So what do we mean by "the body"? Essentially, what is termed "embodied cognition", meaning that is based in some condition or movement of our physical experience. It can be gesture, posture or "regular" motion or movement in learning, but it can also relate to anything about the physical environment of the classroom, or the genders, identities or perceived body images of participants.

50  years ahead of his time, Arthur Lessac put it so well in 1967: Train the body first! Join us in Chicago (hopefully) next spring in passing on that baton! Something noBODY should miss!

Citation: University of Cambridge “Elephant’s “Body Awareness” Adds to Increasing Evidence of Their Intelligence.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 12 April 2017.
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Pronunciation teaching not your cup of tea? It may be your metaphor or M-Cat!

Clipart:

Neuroscientist, Glaser, of King's College, as reported in the Guardian, may just have the "answer": adjust your metaphors! For example, if your students are not as friendly or malleable as they should be, have them all hold a cup of warm tea for a bit. (Caveat emptor: The following is serious fun!) In one study:

"Those holding hot drinks were also more likely to be generous, and less likely to display behaviour thought of as selfish. This is due to the strong linguistic and metaphorical links created in the brain by repeatedly using the words ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ to describe personalities."

"This is due . . . " Wow. That is a bit of a stretch, of course, but he is getting warm . . . Pretty strong claim there, that it is the specific use of such adjectives alone that generates the visceral, affective response. Without digging too deeply into the evidence (which he doesn't, in fact), just hold your warm latte in both hands and read on. 

I've reported earlier on the blog similar research "linking" the metaphorical and somatic/tactile link between words such as "rough" or "coarse", for example, and how the brain seems to interpret those in a way very similar to when one actually touches a surface possessing that tactile quality.

Similar studies connect language and olfaction (smell/aroma therapy), e.g. That argument stinks! Likewise, beginning with work such as Metaphors we live by,  Lakoff and Johnson (2003), and continuing more recently in language teaching, e.g.,  Holme (2004) Mind, Metaphor and Language Teaching, in a very real sense, anything in the classroom is in principle, amenable to intentional (metaphorical) design and adjustment.

In the past, asking students to hold something random to affect their perception of something else was seen as pretty far out--objectionable to the point of unconscious manipulation. But today, with both research on the impact of placibos and pop-neuroscience that encourages a wide range of conscious adjustment of perception, it is a different "ball game"! (I make extensive use of balls in pronunciation teaching.) But first we need to ferret out all the classroom behaviors that are potentially working against us!

What we might term "meta-cup-a-tea" (M-Cat), that is the sensation evoked by touch or physical contact and presence is a variable in all instruction, including pronunciation. In general pronunciation instruction M-Cat may rarely be attended to consciously, but in haptic pronunciation instruction (HaPT) it can be critical, since it can divert awareness away from pronunciation-focused touch-based techniques. (For more on that see this!) In L2 work, however, cultural "misinterpretation" of in-class touching can of course go almost anyplace imaginable.

So let's just look at a few traditional pronunciation teaching "tactile experiences" (other than what goes on in the mouth or what is involved in HaPT) for their potential "Meta-cup-a-tea" contribution (or lack of contribution) to instruction. Listed below are some of my students' best M-Cats. On the face of it many of these are done to reinforce or correlate with a targeted sound or pattern. In practice, it is not at all clear what if any connectedness is realized, nonetheless. In many cases the "contact" or pressure can be counterproductive, interfering or distracting attention--but still fun:

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• blowing air on tissue paper or hands: X is mostly hot air, germ dispersing 
• touching the face: X is untrained; has not taken course in public speaking
• clapping or tapping hands: X is attention-deprived
• stretching rubber bands: X is all thumbs, overextended
• snapping fingers: X impulsive, too much math, phonetics or syntax
• overly precise hand writing: X is scary or boring or compulsive
• hands holding things that are not warm: X is cold, unfeeling
• spinning pencils: X is neurotic, not from this culture, not a native speaker!
• fingers on smart phones, especially when multi-tasking: X is "situ-phrenic"
• hands excessively on books, notebooks: X is bookish, introvert, anachronist, dead-tree-ite
• hands excessively on body parts: X has pronounced problem
• hand or marker moving on iPad or white/smart board: X is hip, maybe even creative
• going through practice cards: X is a dealer
• caressing keyboard or mouse: X is geek-ish, L2-a-phobe, possibly closet rat
• glutes on chair: X is sedentary, butt stable
• sitting on chair in language lab: X is antisocial, isolationist
• full body on bed: X is seriously sedentary, probable "sound-nambulant"
• earphones on/in ears: X is audio-phont, "ear-y" at best
• chewing, eating, drinking: X is hypoglycemic or language hungry
• continually wiping finger prints off iPhone screen: dys-Appled, but possibly good follower
• head scratching: lice, itching to learn, excessive meta-cognition in process

Got any more good M-Cats? Post'em and I'll add them to the list.

Gestures "count" in pronunciation teaching!

Clip art: 

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New study by Fenn and Duffy of Michigan State University and Cook of University of Iowa, summarized by Science Daily, demonstrates that using gestures as a teacher--at least in 4th grade match--results in better learning for students. (Other research has detected the same tendency in one-on-one tutoring as well.) In the study, the focus was an algebra equation. The "gesture" group saw an instructor gesture with one hand, mirror image, to the side of the equation being talked about as it happened. The control group was just "talked to."

They (not surprisingly) offer no explanation as to what may have been behind the striking difference in post treatment testing between the groups, but they do offer three near breath-taking observations ". . . Gesturing can be a very beneficial tool that is completely free and easily employed in classrooms . . . I think it can have long-lasting effects . . . Teachers in the United States tend to use gestures less than teachers in other countries."

The study used "deictic" gestures (pointing at something physically present or conceptual). It is still an interesting piece of evidence. (They could, of course, have tested the main effect by having another group that did not see a gesturing instructor but were, instead, provided with left or right pointing graphic arrows superimposed on the screen.) Just thought I'd point that out . . .

In AH-EPS all pedagogical movement patterns involve deictic anchoring in the visual field as well. That  has to count for something, eh?

Aping good pronunciation teachers

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

(I could also have titled the post "EHIEPing . . . !) Have often been asked about the impact of having learners mirror the pedagogical movement patterns (PMP) of instructors. For example, in doing a correction of the stressed vowel of a repaired word or the rhythm or intonation patterns of a phrase or clause, we generally ask the learner to do the PMP along with us as we both articulate the word, simultaneously. Although learners can learn the PMPs from the haptic videos, instructors can do the training themselves, which involves having learners "dance" along with them for periods of about 3 minutes at a time. (See earlier posts on the meaning of "3-minute" physical routines in learning, in general.) In psychotherapy, the importance of mirroring, both by client and therapist is well understood and practiced very systematically. What Yale psychologist, Santos, confirmed in the case of Capuchin monkeys was that "people warm up to us when we unconsciously mimic them." Apparently what that implies is that your students may not love you anymore if they are EHIEPing your PMPs but you will have no choice but to give them better grades. What a concept! It works in both directions. As Santos notes, the effective communicator mirrors the verbal and nonverbal communication of the other unconsciously anyway (as does his or her mirror neurons as well, of course!) So, EHIEP your students and they'll ape you in return. 

A model of a successful (hapic-integrating) pronunciation teacher?

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Found an interesting questionnaire recently that I am going to adapt slightly to use in haptic-integrated work. It comes out of a 2009 study of the application of NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) in teacher training in Iran by Pishghadam, Shayesteh and Shapoori. (Caveat emptor: I do occasionally use NLP material here. I have published articles about it, in fact. Like any therapeutic system, it has practitioners who get it right and those who don't.) Here are the categories:

"1. Flexibility . . . measures teachers level of flexibility in classroom context in general.
  2. Anchoring . . . process by which an internal or external stimulus triggers a response
  3. Elicitation . . . evoking a state by one`s behavior . . . gathering information by direct observation of non-verbal signals or by asking . . . questions.
  4. Modeling . . . the process of presenting the new or difficult material in order to enable the students to accomplish a task
  5. Individual differences . . . give every individual student in the classroom a sense of belonging by considering all of their points of view and ideas.
  6. Leading . . . changing one's behavior with enough relationship to motivate the other person to follow you
  7. Establishing rapport . . . the process of establishing and maintaining a mutual relationship full of trust and understanding between the teacher and the learners
  8. Emotional and cognitive boosters . . . ability in bringing an emotional environment to evoke the learners' engagement . . . "

2, 3, 4 and 6 are especially relevant to body-based instruction. The others are just good communication, in general. And about the only way you can evaluate your work on those four criteria, other than filling out the questionnaire and asking a colleague who has observed you to confirm it, is to consistently review video of your teaching. So how do you look?

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 909-917, July 2011 © 2011 

Phonetic (or phonemic) gesture revisited (in the classroom)

Clipart: Clker

Clipart: Clker

In the development of our understanding of speech perception, one of the terms used by some researchers was "phonetic gesture." It essentially referred to the process by which sounds are perceived--the articulatory, not the acoustic properties. The key question was just how much one's ability to articulate a sound determined ones's ability to perceive it. What subsequent research has shown is that it is a mixed bag; the relationship between external properties of sound and our internal processing of it is very complex and developmental as well. In short, ongoing perception of speech turns out to be more a matter of our conceptual systems "expectations" than it is with the actual physical properties of what we hear. That is not to say that the felt sense of the bodily "mechanics" is not important and cannot contribute both to understanding and learning. I like the term, phonetic gesture, as relating to the somatic, physical side of sound production and perception. In our work, a better application of that idea might be "phonemic gesture," that is pedagogical movement patterns that represent key meaningful units of sound within English, including vowels, rhythm patterns, stress assignment and intonation contours. As noted earlier, one of my first, informal research studies was to sit in classes of my colleagues and take notes on the use of gesture they used to accompany pronunciation instruction. Those observations got me started on this line of thinking about 20 years ago. That language instructors adapt gesture for many purposes was the subject of this research by Stam and Teller. (Their work is reported in other publications as well.) One interesting finding was the expansion of the range and depth of field of motion of gesture used " . . . an equivalent of shouting in gesture form." So, what is your current pedagogical "phonemic gesture inventory?" What do you mean? 

Shall we "Pronance?" (Leading your class to better pronunciation)

Clip art: Clker

Now there (with a little cross-lingual liberty) is a term perhaps we could use: "Pronance" (French for second-person singular imperative of prononcer meaning: Strongly marked; decided, as in manners, etc.), something of a portmanteau of "dance" and "pronounce!" 

What an apt description of the leading and following involved in working with pedagogical movement patterns in HICP instruction. (Forgive the possibly excessive use of Wikipedia there . . . ) I especially like the sense of being clearly marked . . . as in (nonverbal) manners as it relates to anchoring. From pair dance theory, the three terms "compression, leverage and tension" can also be used to characterize the process of "conducting" the warm up and haptic-integrated anchoring procedures. In essence, the three refer to "moving toward, moving laterally and moving away from." Earlier posts have looked at pair dancing as a haptic practice. 

Given all the evidence from recent research that the brain makes relatively little distinction at some level between tactile and visual (and haptic cinema!), techniques where the instructor is leading from across the room--generally with synchronized body movement with students--anchoring various aspects of pronunciation, discourse structure and vocabulary becomes an engaging pronunciation dance of sorts, a pronance! A haptic anchor involves conscious control of compression, tension and leverage--upper torso movement back as one breathes in prior to speaking, a slight forward torso nod on the stressed syllable, and various lateral motions involving the hands and arms across the visual field. In that "pronance," the marked, decisive movements of the instructor are key. Do you follow?

Telling the truth (or something close to it) in pronunciation teaching

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Machiavelli was purported to have advised that one should always tell the truth . . . because one day you may need to carry off a great lie and you'll want to be believed! He might have added that it is also hard work conceptually and destructive, occupying areas of the brain that could instead be used for something more productive. . . like learning pronunciation, for example. The 2011 research linked above by Porter, Brink and Wallace explores, among other things, the nonverbal "conflicts" that can be detected when lying in some contexts, in two locations on the face: corrugator supercilli (between the eyes) and depressor anguli oris (basically below the lips,) where the evidence of the extra effort seems to erupt to the surface momentarily. Pronunciation instruction at some stages, like learning of any kind, requires extreme concentration and focus of attention. It just happens that the facial muscles and underlying bone structures are also involved in producing sound, so that the effect of restrictions and distractions are magnified. It is more than a good analogy. If haptic-integrated pronunciation anchoring is being done on a multi-tasking, time share basis with other internal or external influences, it can be significantly undermined. (Research reported earlier looked at the susceptibility of haptic engagement to distraction, especially clutter in the visual field and body-based issues such as muscle stiffness or pain.) So, pay attention to quality of attention as evident on the faces of students. On this, don't be caught "lying down" on the job!

Moving accents (a kinaesthetic, Hollywood approach)

Photo credit: DrLillianglass.com

Over a decade ago I had explored the concept of beginning by attempting to change the overall body posture and typical gestural patterns of learners to be more "English-like" (whatever that was going to mean!) In a few specific instances, where the ethnic nonverbal "accent" was markedly different from, for example, typical North American business presentation style, I had some success, but as I became more involved with haptic work, I gave up on trying to identify a more general body-language-based "target" for  learners.

I have read numerous accounts of how Hollywood approaches the problem, seeing accent or dialect and body representation as being almost inseparable. Dr Glass (and her blog) provide a hint (only) into the way it is done. (Note the list of her former clients!) At some point in the future, using virtual reality technology--with haptic interface, of course--we will be able to truly "train the body first!" For the time being, however, we must be satisfied with just a glimpse into the "Looking (at) Glass" . . .