Haptic bonding: connecting new or modified L2 pronunciation back to visual images of words or graphemes

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Haptic bonding! I love that term! It has been common practice with children to use tactile engagement in working with pre-reading, helping them link the sounds with graphemes. The same ideas have been applied widely in rehabilitation as well but the underlying mechanisms involved have not been well understood. In a fascinating-- and very relevant--study by Gentaz and colleagues at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition in Grenoble (CNRS/Université Pierre Mendès France de Grenoble/Université de Savoie), Learning of Arbitrary Association between Visual and Auditory Novel Stimuli in Adults: The “Bond Effect” of Haptic Exploration, summarized by Science Daily, it was demonstrated that " . . . When visual stimuli can be explored both visually and by touch, adults learn arbitrary associations between auditory and visual stimuli more efficiently." And there you have it!

The pronunciation of vocabulary acquisition

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

There any number of studies, especially in computer assisted instruction, that include some consideration of the contribution of pronunciation instruction to vocabulary acquisition. Although it is intuitively obvious that knowing the pronunciation of a word (or attention to pronunciation while it is being learned and anchored) helps in learning its meaning and using it later--if only in writing, it is, of course, not essential, as in the case of the deaf or others who can read an L2 reasonable well but have no idea how the words are pronounced.  It has been difficult to find credible empirical research that isolates the "benefit" of pronunciation work to vocabulary acquisition. (If you know of a good study, please link it to this post.) There are many that include some kind of relatively informal student opinion response data from questionnaires on the subject such as this from Huang and colleagues at Taipei Teachers College that focus on general phonological awareness training. Likewise, the case that haptic anchoring enhances learning of new and changed sound seems a relative slam-dunk at this point but how that process also supports vocabulary acquisition may be an even more important question. Anecdotally, from our experience with the EHIEP pedagogical movement patterns and pronunciation teaching experience in general, that seems a near slam-dunk as well. So, how pronounced is your "vocabulary instruction?" More on this in upcoming posts--and hopefully a workshop at the 2013 TESOL Conference in Dallas next March! 

Haptic phonetics for pronunciation teaching

Clipart: Clker

Clipart: Clker

Most would agree that some training in phonetics is essential for both instructor and learner. How and when that is done can vary greatly, of course. (See summary article by Ashby on the LLAC website, for example.) Most consonant work in phonetics instruction involves a substantial amount of kinaesthetic and tactile engagement, directing learner awareness to points of contact and movement of various parts of the vocal tract. (In EHIEP work, the techniques used for basic consonant change are quite standard, although how that new felt sense is anchored once it is established can be quite different, more systematically L2 learner-oriented.) The haptic-based procedures for teaching the vowel system of a language have been designed for presentation and adaptation of the vowels of any language, not just English. Anchoring sounds in the visual field means positioning higher vowels relatively . . . higher, lower vowels relatively . . . lower, front vowels more to the right, and back vowels more to the left. Diphthongs and vowels with off-glides involve movement across the visual field. Tense vowels involve intense concentration on the sound without movement. Lax vowels involve a light tapping of hands with the articulation, etc. (Those are just representative of how movement and the felt sense of vowel resonance and quality can be anchored in the visual field.) I have done demonstrations of haptic-anchored versions the vowel systems of many languages and dialects, including Korean, French, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, various US dialects, often in first anchoring the learner's L1 before moving to English. Will begin posting Youtube comparative vowel systems this fall. Train the body first, but do "Phonhaptic" training right after that!