Play it again, SLLP! (Avoiding the 8 deadly sins of second language learning practice)

Clip art:
Clker.com

With apologies to Humphrey Bogart, a good first question in a learner interview is something like: How do you practice your pronunciation or English? If he or she plays or has recently played a musical instrument or sang well, I will follow up with an analogous, music-based prompt. 

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Glyde at ultimate-guitar.com has a new piece on something like the "8 deadly sins of bad (guitar) practice--and how to overcome them," which applies beautifully to our work: (His specific "how to" recommendations have been omitted for the time being.)

• Playing instead of practicing guitar
• Focusing too much on new material
• Going through the motions. 
• Failure to break up large practice sessions
• Failing to avoid distractions
• Failing to avoid boring practice routines 
• Failing to set up a practice schedule
• Failing to apply what you know

Not sure that I have ever seen a better, comprehensive framework for embodied practice. I'm going to come back and look at how that approach works specifically in haptic pronunciation teaching. In the meantime, feel free to comment on any of those. 

And, if you are serious about getting even better results with a wider range of learner "styles" this year, just begin by candidly sketching out for yourself how/if your system avoids those pitfalls (or persistent SLLP ups!) -- and have a very good 2015!

 

Bill

Just do it! . . . haptically

Adding touch to movement, tactile to kinesthetic, has proven to be very powerful, especially in getting learners to anchor sounds or sound processes consistently in the same location in the visual field. According to this 2011 research by Smith and colleagues at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, summarized by Science Daily, achieving that kind of precision, which is very important to efficient haptic work, is best accomplished by ". . .continually adjusting the goals of practice movements so that systematic differences (errors) between these movements and the intended motion can be reduced . ."

clip art: Clker

Furthermore, one of the implications is  " . . . a new approach to neurological rehabilitation: one that continually adjusts the goals of practice movements so that systematic differences (errors) between these movements and the intended motion can be reduced." In other words, the learner's attention must be constantly redirected to better positioning or touch or resonance or general form of a haptically embodied sound, providing a very rich type of "motion-referenced learning."

In terms of EHIEP work, that means, for example, focusing on a different parameter of a pedagogical movement pattern, rather than a "simple" repetition beyond a few iterations, such as the positioning, speed, intensity of contact between hands, etc., in anchoring a new or "corrected" sound. The articulation involved may not change perceptively but the practice will continue to be experienced as progressive motor learning, in the sense of the Harvard study.

 It is actually quite easy--once you stop thinking about it . . . and just do it.