Mesmerizing teaching (and pronunciation teachers)

clker.com

The topics of  attention salience and unconscious learning have come up any number of times over the course of the history of the blog, beginning with one of my favorites on that subject back in 2011 on Milton Erickson. In part because of the power of media today and the "discoveries" by neuroscience that we do, indeed, learn on many levels, some out of our immediate awareness, there is renewed interest in the topics--even from Starbucks!

A fascinating new book (to me at least) by Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, summarized by Neuroscience News, explores the history of  "Mesmerism" and a bit about its contemporary manifestations.(QED. . . . if you were not aware that it is still with us!) Ogden is most interested in understanding the abiding attraction of purposeful manipulation or management of unconscious communication, attention and learning. One fascinating observation, from the Neuroscience News summary is:

" . . . that one person’s power of suggestion over another enables the possibility of creating a kind of collaborative or improvisational performance, even unintentionally without people setting it up on purpose."

Get that?  ". . . collaborative or improvisational performance . . . created "unintentionally" Are you aware that you promote that or do any of that in your classroom? If you are, great; if not, great, but is that not also an interesting characterization of the basis of interaction in the language teaching classroom, especially where the focus is modeling, corrective feedback and metacognitive work in pragmatics and usage? In other words, suggestion is at the very heart of instructor-student engagement in some dimensions of the pedagogical process. Unconscious learning and relational affinities were for some time contained in Chomsky's infamous "black box," but are now the subject of extensive research in neuroscience and elsewhere.

And there are, of course, any number of factors that may affect what goes on "below decks" as it were. Turns out there is  (not surprisingly) even a well-established gender dimension or bias to unconscious learning as well.Ya think? A 2015 study by Ziori and Dienes, summarized by Frontiers in Psychology.org, highlights a critical feature of that cognitive process keyed or confounded by the variable of "attentional salience."

In that study, "Facial beauty affects implicit and explicit learning of men and women differently", the conscious and unconscious learning of men was significantly downgraded when the task involved analyzing language associated with the picture of a beautiful woman. Women, on the other hand, actually did BETTER in that phase of the study. The beautiful face did  not distract them in the least, it seemed, in fact to further concentrate their cognitive processing of the linguistic puzzle.

Now exactly why that is the case the researchers only speculate. For example, it may be that men are programmed to tend to see a beautiful woman more initially as "physically of interest", whereas women may see or sense first a competitor, which actually sharpens their processing of the problem at hand.  It was very evident, however, that what is termed "incentive salience" had a strong impact or at least siphoned off cognitive processing resources  . . . for the boys.

There are many dimensions of what we do in instruction that are loaded with "incentive salience", fun or stimulating stuff that we suppose will in essence attract attention or stimulate learners to at least wake up so we can do something productive. Pronunciation instruction is filled with such gimmicks and populated by a disproportionate number of former cheer leaders and "dramatic persona." The combination of unconscious connectivity and "beautiful" techniques may actually work against us.

In haptic work we figured out about a decade ago that not only how you look but what you wear can impact effectiveness of mirroring of instructor gesture in class. The fact that I am old and bald may account for the fact that students find me easier to follow than some of my younger associates? Take heart, my friends, the assumed evolutionary advantage of "beautiful people" may not only be waning, but actually be working against them in the pronunciation classroom at least! 

The "Magpie Effect" in pronunciation teaching: what you see is (not necessarily) what you get!

Credit:

Clker.com

Wow! I knew there had to be a term for flashy, beautiful visual aids in pronunciation teaching, and education in general, that may (best case) contribute very little, if anything to the process: the Magpie Effect.


One of the fundamental assumptions of materials design is that visual salience--what stands out due to design, color, placement, etc.--is key to uptake. In general, the claims are far stronger than that. Brighter colors, striking photos and engaging layouts are the stuff of advertising and marketing. Marketing research has long established the potential impact of all of those, in addition to seduction of the other senses.

A new study by Henderson and Hayes of UC Davis, “Meaning-based guidance of attention in scenes as revealed by meaning maps', as reported by NeuroscienceNews.com, provides a striking alternative view into how visual processing and visual attention work. Quoting from the summary:

"Saliency is relatively easy to measure. You can map the amount of saliency in different areas of a picture by measuring relative contrast or brightness, for example. Henderson called this the “magpie theory” our attention is drawn to bright and shiny objects.“It becomes obvious, though, that it can’t be right,” he said, otherwise we would constantly be distracted."

What the Henderson and Hayes (2017) research suggests is that what we attend to in the visual field in front of us has more to do with the mental schema or map we bring to the experience than with the "bright and shiny" object there. Of course, that does not exclude being at least momentarily distracted by those features, or even more importantly the visual "clutter" undermining the connection to the learner's body or somatic experience of a sound or expression.

There have been literally dozens of blog posts here exploring the basic "competition" between visual and auditory modalities. Hint: Visual almost always trumps audio or haptic, except when audio and  haptic team up in some sense--as in haptic pronunciation teaching! The question is, if the impact of glitz and graphics may be a wash, or random at best, what do optimal "maps" in pronunciation teaching "look" like to the learner? The problem, in part, is in the way the question is stated, the visual metaphor itself: look.

Whenever I get stuck on a question of modalities in learning, I go back to Lessac (1967): Train the body first. Anchor sound in body movement and vocal resonance, and then use that mapping in connecting up words and speaking patterns in general. (If you are into mindfulness training, you get this!) The reference to the learner is always what it FEELS like in the entire body to pronounce a word or phrase, not it's visual/graphic representation or cognitive rationale or procedural protocol for doing it!

So, how can we describe the right map in pronunciation teaching? Gendlin's (1981) concept of "felt sense" probably captures it best, a combination of movement, touch and resonance generated by the sound, combined with cognitive insight/understanding of the process and place of the sound in the phonology of the L2. But always IN THAT ORDER, with that sense of priorities.The key is to be able to in effect "rate" or scale the intensity and boundaries of a sensation in the body, still a highly cognitive, conscious process. From there, the sensation can be recalled or moderated, or even associated to other concepts or symbols.

In other words, in pronunciation instruction the body is the territory; designated locations,  measured sensations and movements across it are the map that must be in place before words and meanngs are efficiently attached or reattached. Setting up the map still requires . . .  serious drill and practice. Once done, feel free to channel your "inner Magpie", glitz, color, song and dance!

Original source: 
“Meaning-based guidance of attention in scenes as revealed by meaning maps” by  Henderson. J. and Hayes, T.,  in Human Nature. Published online September 25 2017 doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0208-0

The felt sense of a new or "replacement" vowel: Y-buzz and beyond

Clip art: 

Clker

The first phase of EHIEP training is involved with haptically anchoring the vowels of English. Even if the learner "has" a vowel already in his or her repertoire, it is essential that a new and more focused, conscious awareness of the somatic qualities of the vowel be established to facilitate later change and monitoring of spontaneous speaking.

That concept is based on Lessac's notion of the "Y-buzz" sensation. Here is a 2007 study by Barrichelo and Behlau that looked at the perceptual salience of that highly resonant sound/sensation, as opposed to "normal" production by subjects of the acoustically similar [i] sound (as in the word, "me,' for example.) The unique, therapeutically created Y-buzz vowel felt sense is the model for our work. The learner's ability to produce the Y-buzz is almost entirely body-based, not auditory. In that way, the learner can produce it without having to "go through" the possibly "defective" [i] vowel in his or her current interlanguage phonology. (See earlier post on "changing the channel.")

Need to put a little more "buzz" in your teaching?