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

Killing pronunciation 4: Dis-integrated vs prior schema-based pronunciation change

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What does it mean to "integrate" pronunciation work into "regular" instruction? And if you do, how do you know if it "worked"--or why? : Caveat emptor: Without informed, systematic follow up, most pronunciation instruction is probably a crap shoot, dicey at best. 

That thought was again inspired, in part, by a recent article in the new Handbook of  Pronunciation Teaching by Sicola and Darcy entitled: Integrating Pronunciation into the Language Classroom.  

To access the chapter you have to buy the Handbook itself, prices ranging from about $125 to $195USD, plus tax and shipping, or just the online chapter itself for about $35USD--or from about 6 vente carmel frapps up to around 40!

In essence, Sicola and Darcy argue that since there is a range of pronunciation teaching techniques and strategies that have been shown to produce some gain or results in reported practice or quasi-experimental studies, then when integrated into general classroom instruction--as opposed to being taught in a separate class or individualized work online-- they should work in that integrated context, too. Really? I think they are maybe half right, but they have almost no "hard" evidence to support that claim.

An earlier post focused on why figuring out whether or not a method works can be so problematic in education today: basically, integrated instruction can mask the actual impact of individual techniques and procedures, such as homework--or pronunciation. Context of instruction trumps technique, almost always.

The near consensus among researchers investigating in-class feedback and correction, for example, as unpacked in a recent blogpost, is now that for genuine, effective uptake to occur in pronunciation work it must be predominantly in follow up that it occurs not in initial in-class presentation and practice -- or homework, but as it followed up on later and repeatedly (Rosario et al, 2015).

So, how do you best set up the key pronunciation schema that you need to use in everyday instruction, in little vignettes or mini-lessons inserted into speaking, listening, reading and writing courses, or . . . in something like the old reliable, stand alone "pronunciation class" that provided the basic training that was then followed up on or used spontaneously during incidental "teachable moments"  by any and all instructors in the program at large?

Where are we headed? My guess: back to good "out of class" experience and basic pronunciation  training, either in the form of specific pronunciation-designated classes or something analogous, such as web-based training,  that is then referred back to by instructors in integrated pronunciation work all over the place and curriculum. In other words, pronunciation techniques should be part of everybody's tool kit but ideally the basic training should occur someplace else, before the problem is addressed in class. Our colleagues who do public speaking and voice training have had this right for decades.

The sooner some of what passes for (one-shot-mini-lesson-in-the-middle-of-something-else-with-no-clear-follow-up-based) integrated instruction disintegrates, the better! (It already has in haptic pronunciation instruction, of course, should you need a great model of how to do it!)

Sources:

Rosario, P., Nunez, J., Vallejo, G., Cunha, J., Nunes, T., Suarez, N., Fuentes, S. & Moreira, T. (2015). The effects of teachers' homework follow-up practices on students' EFL performance: a randomized-group design. Retrieved from: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01528/full.

Killing pronunciation 3: Grit

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To the "gritty" student, there can be nothing more frustrating than pointless, unproductive pronunciation homework--or even worse, none at all.

If you are a follower of this blog, you know I am a big fan of James Clear. If you need to change something--most anything--and you still don't need a coach or therapist to help get you there, his website is worth a visit. His latest post on "building mental toughness" linked to an earlier piece: Grit: a complete guide on being mentally tough. (Embedded in that post is a TED talk by Duckworth, on "grit" which you should also watch if you haven't already.)

Grit is defined in a number of ways but, basically, it means having the strength of character to persevere to ones goals. 

Grit is a key variable in success in pronunciation, I'm sure, although I have been unable to find a good study to verify that. My own experience with accent reduction clients is that to fix their accent  they need just two thing: grit and money (and time, of course.)

Where that especially comes into play is in homework--my current area of research in preparation for a panel at the 2017 TESOL Convention later this month. If you have a student who has real grit, in terms of pronunciation homework, can you provide him or her with sufficient direction as to what to work on and practice outside of class? I have been asking that question repeatedly of late and the overwhelming response from instructors is . . . No!

In fact some instructors have replied that monitored and required practice outside of class, such as drill and repetition and oral reading is probably not worth the effort. And even if it is, "how am I to know whether it was done well or productively?"

There you have it. One of Clear's key principles, based on current research, is that in developing grit the learner must NOT rely on motivation but on habit, on discipline. But for a student to do that, there must be clear guidance and assignments.

How do your homework assignments and guidance to your students on how to improve their pronunciation stack up with that criteria? Probably not all that well, right? This is big, actually. We are just coming out of a period where focus on motivation and meta-cognition (thought and planning about pronunciation change) have been enormously influential.

One of Clear's other principles in developing it is to: Build grit with small physical wins. There are any number of ways to do that, of course, but it takes a consistent, coherent method at least. In pronunciation work, that is or should be a "gimme!"

EHIEP is based on the idea that embodied (gesture-based) homework/practice is key. The success of the system relies on establishing cognitive schema (haptic cognition) such that subsequent in class or incidental learning or correction of pronunciation will happen efficiently, as the learn relates back to the model or rule learned earlier. (That is one of the most important findings in research on incidental correction in class of pronunciation.) In general, homework is carefully prescribed to help create such schema and students need to "homework" at least 3 times a week for 30 minutes to facilitate that, preferably every day.

It takes "true grit" to do that -- and manage it. If that is not part of your current method and "growth mindset" (Dweck, 2016), "Clear" up your current pedagogical habits and grit back to us!

(New) Haptic cognition-based pronunciation teaching workshop at 2016 TESL Ontario Conference

If you are coming to the 2016 TESL Ontario Conference later this month (November 24 and 25 in Toronto) please join us for the Haptic Pronunciation Teaching Workshop, on Thursday, 3:45 to 4:45. This will introduce the new "haptic cognition" framework for (amazingly) more efficient and integrated pronunciation modeling and correction that we have been developing for the last year or so. (See previous post on the applicability of a haptic cognition-based  model to pronunciation teaching in general.)

HaPT-E, v4.0

Haptic cognition defined: 

• The felt sense of pronunciation change (Gendlin, 1996) – somatic (body) awareness and conscious, meta-cognitive processing 
• Change activated consciously and initially through body movement pattern use (Lessac, 1967) 
• Haptic (movement+touch) uniting, integrating and “prioritizing” of modalities in anchoring and recall (Minogue, 2006)

Modalities of the model:

• Meta-cognitive (rules, schemas, explanations, conscious association of sound or form to other sounds or forms)
• Auditory (sound patterns presented or recalled) 
• Haptic
• Kinesthetic (movement patterns experienced/performed or mirrored by the body, gesture, motion patterns)
•  Cutaneous (differential skin touch: pressure, texture, temperature)
• Vocal resonance (vibrations throughout upper body, neck and head)
• Visual (visual schema presented or recalled: graphemes, charts, colors, modeling, demonstrations) 

 General instructional principles:

• Get to "haptic" as soon as possible in modeling and correcting.
• Use precise pedagogical movements patterns (PMPs), including tracking and speed in the visual field.
• Insure as much cutaneous anchoring as possible.
• Go “light” on visual; avoid overly “gripping” visual schema during haptic engagement.
• Use as much vocal resonance as possible.
• Repeat as few times as possible.
• Insure that homework/follow up is feasible, clear—and done (including post hoc reporting of work, results and incidental/related learnings).
• Use haptic PMPs first in correction/recall prompting, before providing oral, spoken model.

The elaborated, audio-embedded Powerpoint from the workshop will be available later this month.

KIT

Lost in space: Why phoneme vowel charts may inhibit learning of pronunciation

In a recent workshop I inadvertently suggested that the relative distances between adjacent English vowels on various standard charts, such as the IPA matrix or those used in pronunciation teaching were probably not all that important. Rather than "stand by" that comment, I need to "distance myself" from it! Here's why.

Several posts on the blog, including a recent one, have dealt with the basic question of to what extent visual stimuli can potentially undermine learning of sound, movement and touch (the basic stuff of the haptic approach to pronunciation teaching.) I went back to Doellar and Burgess (2008), "Distinct error-correcting and incidental learning of location relative to landmarks and boundaries" (Full citation below.), one of the key pieces of research/theory that our haptic work has been based on.

In essence, that study demonstrated that we have two parallel systems for learning locations, in two different parts of the brain, one from landmarks in the visual (or experiential) field and another from boundaries of the field. Furthermore, boundaries tend to override landmarks in navigating. (For instance, when finding your way in the dark, your first instinct is to go along the wall, touching what is there, if possible, not steer through landmarks or objects in the field in front of you whose relative location may be much less fixed in your experience.)

Most importantly for us, boundaries tend to be learned incidentally; landmarks, associatively. In other words, location relative to boundaries is more like a map, where the exact point is first identified by where it is relative to the boundary, not the other points within the map itself. Conversely, landmarks tend to be learned associatively, relative to each other, not in relation to the boundary of the field, which may be irrelevant anyway, not conceptually present.

So what does that imply for teaching English vowels? 

• Learner access in memory to the vowels when still actively working on improving pronunciation is generally a picture or image of a matrix, where the vowels are placed in it. (Having asked learners for decades how they "get to" vowels, the consistent answer is something like: "I look at the vowel chart in my mind.")
• The relative position of those vowels, especially adjacent vowels, is almost certainly tied more to the boundaries of the matrix, the sides and intersecting lines, not the relative auditory and articulatory qualities of the sounds themselves. 
• The impact of visual schema and processing over auditory and haptic is such that, at least for many learners, the chart is at least not doing much to facilitate access to the articulatory and somatic features of the phonemes, themselves. (I realize that is an empirical question that cries out for a controlled study!)
• The phonemic system of a language is based fundamentally on relative distances between phonemes. The brain generally perceives phonemic differences as binary, e.g., it is either 'u' or 'U', or 'p' or 'b', although actual sound produced may be exceedingly close to the conceptual "boundary" separating them. 
• Haptic work basically backgrounds visual schema and visual prominence, attempting to promote a stronger association between the sounds, themselves, and the "distance" between them, in part by locating them in the visual field immediately in front of the learner, using gesture, movement and touch, so that the learner experiences the relative phonemic "differences" as distinctly as possible.
• We still do some initial orientation to the vowel system using a clock image with the vowels imposed on it, to establish the technique of using vowel numbers for correction and feedback, but try to get away from that as soon as possible, since that visual schema as well gives the impression that the vowels are somehow "equidistant" from each other--and, of course, according to Doellar and Burgess (2008) probably more readily associated with the boundary of the clock than with each other.

 (Based on excerpt from Basic Haptic Pronunciation, v4.0, forthcoming, Spring, 2016.)

Doellar, C. and Burgess, N. (2008). "Distinct error-correcting and incidental learning of location relative to landmarks and boundaries", retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/105/15/5909.long, December 19, 2015.

Good looking, intelligible English pronunciation: Better seen (than just) heard

One of the less obvious shortcomings of virtually all empirical research in second language pronunciation intelligibility is that is generally done using only audio recordings of learner speech--where the judges cannot see the faces of the subjects. In addition, the more prominent studies were done either in laboratory settings or in specially designed pronunciation modules or courses.

In a fascinating, but common sense 2014 study by Kawase, Hannah and Wang it was found that being able to see the lip configuration of the subjects, as they produced the consonant 'r', for example, had a significant impact on how the perceived intelligibility of the word was rated. (Full citation below.) From a teaching perspective, providing visual support or schema for pronunciation work is a given. Many methods, especially those available on the web, strongly rely on learners mirroring visual models, many of them dynamic and very "colorful." Likewise, many, perhaps most f2f pronunciation teachers are very attentive to using lip configuration, their own or video models, in the classroom.

What is intriguing to me is the contribution of lip configuration and general appearance to f2f intelligibility. There are literally hundreds of studies that have established the impact of facial appearance on perceived speaker credibility and desirability. So why are there none that I can find on perceived intelligibility based on judges viewing of video recordings, as opposed to just audio? In general, the rationale is to isolate speech, not allowing the broader communicative abilities of the subjects to "contaminate" the study. That makes real sense on a theoretical level, bypassing racial and ethnic and "cosmetic" differences, but almost none on a practical, personal level.

There are an infinite number of ways to "fake" a consonant or vowel, coming off quite intelligibly, while at the same time doing something very much different than what a native speaker would do. So why shouldn't there be an established criterion for how mouth and face look as you speak, in addition to how the sounds come out? Turns out that there is, in some sense. In f2f interviews, being influenced by the way the mouth and eyes are "moving" is inescapable.

Should we be attending more to holistic pronunciation, that is what the learner both looks and sounds like as they speak? Indeed. There are a number of methods today that have learners working more from visual models and video self recordings. That is, I believe, the future of pronunciation teaching, with software systems that provide formative feedback on both motion and sound. Some of that is now available in speech pathology and rehabilitation.

There is more to this pronunciation work than what doesn't meet the eye! The key, however, is not just visual or video models, but principled "lip service", focused intervention by the instructor (or software system) to assist the learner in intelligibly "mouthing" the words as well.

This gives new meaning to the idea of "good looking" instruction!

Full citation:
Kawase S, Hannah B, Wang Y. (2014). The influence of visual speech information on the intelligibility of English consonants produced by non-native speakers. J Acoust Soc Am. 2014 Sep;136(3):1352. doi: 10.1121/1.4892770.

Virtual boundaries in pronunciation instruction

Clip art: Clker

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, it appears that a virtual boundary may be even more valuable in pronunciation instruction. As reported by Science Daily, a series of research studies by Lee at Columbia, and Zhao and Soman at the University of Toronto have demonstrated that those who see themselves " . . . in-system individuals [those who perceive themselves as being inside a virtual boundary of specific types] demonstrate increased action initiation, persistence in completing tasks, and overall optimism." Those types of situational boundaries include, for example, visual markers of waiting queues, recurrent verbal messages indicating one's precise place in a system, or imagined pathways. What the research suggests is that once one moves inside the boundary, what they refer to as the "in-system boundary," either figuratively or literally, the effect can be striking.

Clip art: Clker

The parallels in pronunciation work include (a) visual schema, such as vowel charts; (b) auditory schema such as model sentences used in instruction and practice; (c) kinaesthetic schema such as range of motion of the lips, tongue and jaw in articulation; (d) tactile schema such as points where teeth touch the lips; (e) somatic schema such as vowel resonance; (f) situationally, the boundaries present in signalling a time interval identified for attention to pronunciation or focus on form, and, of course, (g) haptic-integrated schema such as EHIEP pedagogical movement patterns which terminate in touch. The key, of course, is how those boundaries are established, maintained and managed. Step outside yours for a bit and consider how they function for your students. If they are problematic, it may well be time that you get more in touch.