Haptic pronunciation teaching (un)masked!

A student just asked the question: How can I teach pronunciation in a mask? Where he is, already back in the classroom, he and most of his students are wearing masks. It can be difficult enough when you can't see your students' faces, let alone when they can't see yours! The end of pronunciation teaching as we know it? No, not at all. Here's how . . .

In 2014, I was in the Middle East doing teacher training workshops. I was scheduled to do one at a women's college. NEVER occurred to me that the (150) students might be wearing burqas . . . which almost all of them were, covered, head to foot. One of the most successful and well received sessions I have ever done. (See the blogpost on that for more detail as to how it happened and my thoughts as to why it seemed to go so well!) 

With the exception of most consonants and a few features of vowels, most everything else of real importance in pronunciation work can be done in a mask . . . haptically. By that I mean, taught "from scratch," except where the learner has relatively little idea of where things in the vocal track have to go and touch to come up with a vowel or consonant sound.

Suprasegmentals (rhythm, stress and intonation) done in masks is a piece of cake, in fact, maybe even preferable in some cases. If you haven't already, go to www.actonhaptic.com and watch the demo videos. Even for vowels, you can do correction and feedback in a mask effectively, as long as the learner has the basic physical routine stored "in there" somewhere that can be recalled.

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Doing a new demonstration shortly of more ideas on effective "masked" pronunciation as part of the upcoming webinars. July 24th and 25th. Contact info@actonhaptic.com for reservations.

New Syllablettes Chorus Line at BC TEAL Conference!

This Friday (April 12th) at 3:30 at the  BCTEAL conference  at Langara College, BC, we'll roll out the 2019 version of the Syllablettes. The Syllablettes Chorus Line Technique was introduced in 1996 at the TESOL Convention in Chicago. In many teacher training programs world wide it is still a staple, a fun and effective way of introducing the importance of the syllable in English pronunciation teaching.

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In essence, each student takes on the role of a syllable, performing "it" with full-body as the word, phrase or sentence is articulated by the rest of the "syllables."  The individual can be tasked with any of several features of a syllable in English:

• Pitch (5 levels)
• Pitch movement
• Volume (5 levels)
• Length (3)
• Linking to adjacent syllables
• Embodying consonants or glides on either side of the vowel core
• "Falling" out, as in vowel ellipsis
• Creating space between syllables

There is much new in this 2019 version, including attention to both suprasegmentals and internal make up of the syllable. You don't need to use ALL those features, of course, but it works for any set of learners, from beginners to phonetics classes.

The session will be recorded and available here on the blog shortly. If you are coming to the conference and are OK with being seen on video worldwide acting really "silly-able", please let me know!

And remember to sign up for the next Haptic webinar on May 17th and 18th (info@actonhaptic.com).

Teaching EnglishL2 advanced conversation (with hand2hand prosodic and paralinguistic "comeback")

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We'll be doing a new workshop: "Pronunciation across the 'spaces' between sentences and speakers."  At the 2018 BCTEAL Conference here in Vancouver in May. Here is the summary:

This workshop introduces a set of haptic (movement + touch) based techniques for working with English discourse-level prosodic and paralanguistic bridges between participants in conversation, including, key, volume and pace. Some familiarity with teaching of L2 prosodics (basically: rhythm, stress, juncture and intonation) is recommended.

The framework is based to some extent on Prosodic Orientation in English Conversation, by Szczepek-Reed, and new features of v5.0 of the haptic pronunciation teaching system: Essential Haptic-interated English Pronunciation (EHIEP), available by August, 2018. The innovation is the use of several pedagogical movement patterns (PMPs) that help learners attend to the matches and mismatches of prosodics and paralanguage between participants in conversation that create and maintain coherence and . . . empathy across conversational turns.

For a quick glimpse of just the basic prosodic PMPs, see the demo of the AH-EPS ExIT (Expressiveness) from EHIEP v2.0.

The session is only 45 minutes long, so it will just be an experiential overview or tour of the set of speech-synchronized-gesture-and-touch techniques. The video, along with handouts, will be linked here in late May.

Join us!

Tapping into English rhythm--but not teaching it or remembering it!

Credit: Anna Shaw

One question I often pose to language teachers is something like: How do you teach rhythm? The most frequent answers: I don't! (or) You can't! (or) How do you do that? There are no studies that I am aware of that investigate relative effectiveness of teaching L2 rhythm in English. A recent study of instructor priorities in teaching pronunciation, by Saito (2013) includes a questionnaire that does not even  mention rhythm as an option.

So why can rhythm be difficult to teach? New research by Tierney and Kraus (2016 - full citation below), entitled, Evidence for Multiple Rhythmic Skills, suggests why--and possibly something of a solution. What they found, in VERY simple terms. was, in essence, that the brain "circuitry" for keeping up a beat, such as tapping fingers along music, is actually quite different from the neurological connections that encode and recall rhythmic patterns. In other words, just because students can follow along with common rhythm techniques, such as tapping fingers on the desk or clapping hands to rhythmic patterns, does not mean that they will be able to remember or use those patterns later.

This is big. In an earlier post, I reported on the "haptic" basis of similar research, showing that differentiation between multiple instances of repeated touch on one location can be exceedingly difficult for the brain to process. That is, from a pronunciation perspective, tapping on desks or clapping hands or stretching rubber bands to learn stress patterns, where one syllable is spoken louder or stronger than the others may not be all that effective.

In part in response to that research, the Essential Haptic-integrated English Pronunciation (EHIEP) system uses a framework where rhythm is taught using a gestural framework that involves encoding the pattern not just as a sequence of touches on the body, but also places the stressed element in a different location from the unstressed elements--AND--uses consistent positions and movement across the visual field to further distinguish the pattern. Here is a good example, the Butterfly technique.

For more on how to teach that way, tap here!

Full citation:
Tiery, A. and Kraus, A. (2016) Evidence for Multiple Rhythmic Skills, September 16, 2015
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0136645

Workshop on stressing and de-stressing unstressed vowels: the haptic “thumb-flick” technique

On the 22nd of November at the local BCTEAL regional conference, I'll be doing a new haptic workshop on unstressed vowels, with Aihua Liu of Harbin Institute of Technology and Jean Jeon, a graduate student her at Trinity Western University. You can see an introduction to the technique here.

Summary:

Clip art:
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This participatory, experiential session presents a haptic (gesture + touch) procedure for helping learners produce and better “hear” unstressed vowels in English. In essence, as words are articulated, learners touch hands at specific points in the visual field on stressed vowels and “flick their thumbs” on the unstressed vowels.

Proposal:

Working with unstressed vowels in English is often neglected. The problem is often “solved” by avoiding the issue entirely or by emphasizing suprasegmentals (rhythm, stress and intonation) which, research suggests, do indeed help to determine the prominence of unstressed syllables to some extent. In addition, there may be some limited, indirect attention to unstressed vowels in oral practice of reduced forms, especially in fixed phrases (e.g., “salt ‘n pepper) and idioms.

Research has recently demonstrated that disproportionate attention to suprasegmentals (rhythm, stress and intonation) without a balanced, production-oriented treatment of key segmentals (vowels and consonants) may be very counter-productive, undermining intelligibility substantially. That is especially the case with learners whose L1 is Vietnamese, for example.

This technique helps to address that issue by facilitating more appropriate, controlled focus on the vowel quality in unstressed syllables.  It involves the use of two types of pedagogical gestures, one that adds additional attention to the stressed vowel of the word and a second that helps learners to better approximate the target sound and maintain the basic syllabic structure of the word.

The session is experiential and highly participatory. Participants are provided materials and links to Youtube.com videos demonstrating the technique.