Good, or at least less "distracting" distraction in (pronunciation) teaching

Now here is some "different" research from the Journal of Food Science Education and the journal, Perception, that you may have missed (summarized by Science Daily). The first, by Schmidt of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, titled: Distracted learning: Big problem and golden opportunity; the second, by Hipp, Olsen and Gerhardstein, Mind-Craft: Exploring the Effect of Digital Visual Experience on Changes to Orientation Sensitivity in Visual Contour Perception.

In pronunciation teaching, and especially so in haptic work, distraction can be lethal, depending on which modality it is coming through! Dealing with it is always high priority. We manage distraction and attention several ways, but principally with gesture, touch and management of the visual field. 

Schmidt's report reviews research on sources of potential distraction evident in the multitasking world of today and then considers a number of potentially effective measures for addressing them. Hibb et al examine an intriguing phenomena where the brain/eyes are seen adapting in surprising ways to the visual digital milieu, especially shifting among different environments that we are engaged in today. Taken together, the two studies seem to suggest that, probably for a number of reasons, distraction is emerging as a much more complex and variable phenomenon in the experience of those who have "grown up" in that milieu than we often assume. 

In other words, the impact of disruptive elements on learning and teaching-- and consequently the potential effectiveness of mediation procedures, needs to be reconsidered. Listed below, paraphrased and reorganized into three categories, are the set of recommendations from Schmidt's study: 

Pre-Conditions:

• Removing extraneous devices from workspaces
• Incorporating movement into classroom activities
• Promoting and implementing active learning
• Using a work-reward system

Classroom protocols: 

• Alternating intensive periods of focused work with preplanned bursts of pleasure
• Developing course content on topics of students' choosing 
• Having them teach it to other students

Cognitive and meta-cognitive:

• Encouraging development of internal locus of control
• Fostering a work-hard, play-hard mindset
• Encouraging setting of goals related to academic performance 

Nothing there, in itself, surprising, of course, but taken together or reconsiderd as a fuller set of strategies that may, in combination, work to moderate distraction--as a more primary/preliminary target of instruction with today's learners, with their evolving attentional systems, is worth "attending to!" 

Bottom line: The impact of both distraction and of those mediation strategies on "native media-ites," those who have grown up in computer mediated experience (and devices), probably those now in their mid to late 20s or somewhat earlier, may be evolving or emerging in new forms. In other words, multitasking for those learners is apparently becoming experientially and phenomenologically different than it is to earlier "pre-media" generations: they seem to be adapting in ways such that they can be both less . . .  distracted and, consequently, more amenable to pedagogical mediation. 

In a subsequent post, I'll continue this thread exploring specific mediations that apply to (haptic) pronunciation teaching. 

Sources: 

Shelly J. Schmidt. Distracted learning: Big problem and golden opportunity. Journal of Food Science Education, 2020; 19 (4): 278 DOI: 10.1111/1541-4329.12206

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau. (2020, October 14). Distracted learning a big problem, golden opportunity for educators, students. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 17, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201014140932.htm

D. Hipp, S. Olsen, P. Gerhardstein. Mind-Craft: Exploring the Effect of Digital Visual Experience on Changes to Orientation Sensitivity in Visual Contour Perception. Perception, 2020; 030100662095098 DOI: 10.1177/0301006620950989

Binghamton University. (2020, September 30). Screen time can change visual perception -- and that's not necessarily bad. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 17, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200930144422.htm

The "truthiness" (or thereabouts) about haptic-integrated pronunciation teaching

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

I have gotten several questions as to why I use clip art and the "left-pointing hand" on blogposts. Other than the obvious, just to "spiff" things up a bit, it turns out that those visuals actually reinforce the "truthiness" of the post.  Newman and colleagues, in research inspired by comedian Stephen Colbert, summarized in Science Daily, report that: "A picture inflates the perceived truth of true and false claims . . . In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim." Then, at the conclusion of the summary, in another one for your "Well, duh . . ." or "Ya think?" file, the authors are quoted as observing, "Our research suggests that these photos might have unintended consequences, leading people to accept information because of their feelings rather than the facts." Unintended consequences? I am almost tempted to go back and edit out all the graphics from the last two years--and then have you reread--or ignore many of them, just to check that theory. We could, alternatively, just go back to "pre-haptic-integrated" pronunciation teaching. As noted in several previous blogpost, haptic engagement has been shown believably to at least constrain the influence of visual "clutter" and interference with auditory and somatic anchoring, processing and retrieval. (And, as usual, ignore the hypnotically beautiful, engaging geisha over there to the left . . . or the finger off to the right pointing to the geisha on the left!)

I like to move it, move it! (Rhythm as the basis of integrated pronunciation work )

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

If you haven't seen Madagascar and the sequel--and your body isn't shaking rhythmically already in anticipation of Madagascar 3, there is little hope for you. THE song from the movie, I like to move it, move it!, should become the EHIEP anthem as well--especially in light of this new research on motor neurons. Now I realize that this may be a bit of a reach . . . connecting a study of monkeys' shoulder muscle neuron rhythmic patterning reaching for a button--to the primacy of rhythm in integrating pronunciation work, but the underlying principle has broad implications. What the Stanford researchers found was that, unlike visual neurons which basically take pictures of the external world, motor neurons in the brain generate local rhythmic patterns (of varying degrees of extension and contraction, for example) which are then, in effect, piled on top of others to create body movement. In other words, movement created in the brain by mechanisms very different than vision. Movement is then directed by higher order structures, of course, among them the visual cortex. The analogy to music, poetry--and even pronunciation instruction--is worth considering. It may be time to seriously revisit pattern practice (well conceived) in pronunciation teaching, and teaching in general. In principle, rhythmic patterning, in rhythm or thought groups (perhaps in the form of initial anchoring of the syllable structure of a word or syllable/stress pattern) should be the first step in learning a new or changed pronunciation (In EHIEP, it is.) Getting the felt sense of movement and somatic "vibration" inherent in a target string of sounds--while or even before identifying and anchoring vowel quality--has been central to many "intuitive" or practitioner-created pronunciation teaching methods. We have now reached the point where neuroscience is moving in that direction as well!

"Fontastic" anchoring of sound!

Clip art: Clker

Credit: Science/AAAS

Taken a close look at a learner pronunciation book lately? (I have some insider information here . . . ) The assumption is that, other than the usual selection of boldface, italics and underlining, the character of the visual display presented in working with sound is essentially no different than any other subject matter. The best analogy might be teenage middle school social science texts--the book making one last effort to mimic the web. Even if the text has brilliant color, artistic images and other text manipulation as a few do, to paraphrase a recent pop song far too often: What happens in student books . . . stays in student books! INTEGRATED pronunciation instruction? Now that is another matter. Sorry, that's about all the special effects blogger will allow: boldface, italics, underlining, all caps, font color and background color. The research on those text features in marketing and advertising is extensive, all of which seem to come to the same conclusion: Try to hold the eyes hostage for a bit. A recent study (using fMRI, of course) summarized by ScienceShots looked at the relationship between font size and emotional response " . . . emotional signals [in the brain] elicited by the larger font size lasted a total of 180 milliseconds longer. The results are similar to emotional responses to large and small versions of pictures with fearful, disgusting, or sex-related content. Pictures hold biological relevance for people, since a big photo of a predator probably signals proximity to you." And then comes a classic "Well . . . Duh . . . ": "Similar emotional effects on font sizes probably reflect the importance language holds in our society, the authors speculate. " (Italics, mine.) So what is the bottom line here in creating classroom-visual materials in haptic-integrated anchoring of pronunciation change, especially in terms of prominence? More and more teacher-based publishers are going to e-Materials, where you can adjust font and visual display characteristics yourself. For the time being, however, --after the Pedagogical MOVEment Pattern is anchored, of course--stick on a few extra milliseconds of visual processing whenever you can--anyway you can. And may your FONTs be with you! 

Effortless pronunciation learning: a la The Matrix!

(Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, NSF)

Clip art: Clker

According to this ScienceDaily summary: " . . . it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise." That may be a bit over the top, but note this: "The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned." The "skills" being enhanced in this research by basically implanting neural routines in the brain were essentially visual, such as ability to discriminate fine detail, but it looks impressive: "The result, say researchers, is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance." The extension to aural and tactile mapping is only a matter of time. In fact it is easy to see it working with the EHIEP vowel matrix.

Touches worth a thousand pictures (or sounds)

Clipart: Clker

Clipart of Nobel:
Clker

One of the basic assumptions of research in haptics has been that in most settings visual stimuli override auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile. The import of studies reported in earlier posts for our work had been that haptic procedures (such as hand movements across the visual field to anchor intonation) were "seen" to be highly susceptible to interference from visual distraction in the immediate environment. What the new research revealed is that in a very real sense both visual and haptic information are, in effect, processed in the same channel or areas in the brain. Which of the modalities dominates at any point in time appears now to have as much to do with the quality of the stimuli themselves, not some intrinsic difference in potency of the modality type. The point is this: from a theoretical perspective, it means that haptic work done right can be enormously powerful in anchoring sound, much more so than I had thought possible earlier. In retrospect, I have consistently seen evidence of the strength of haptic anchoring, regardless of the scene or potential distractions in the classroom but was hesitant to interpret that as evidence reflecting more of a balance in visual/haptic processing. A  welcome touch of uncommon (unconventional) sense . . . 

Grasping new pronunciation

In the remarkable study by Symes of Plymouth University and colleagues reported in Science Daily, it was demonstrated that " . . . using a grabbing action with our hands can help our processing of visual information." In essence, by performing that hand movement, in preparation for touching a fruit of various sizes, features of a picture were more quickly recognized--assuming that the hand position reflected the shape of the object to be viewed.

The EHIEP vowel protocol uses a set of analogous gestures that simulate the felt sense, including duration of the vowel to be anchored (spoken as the hands touch). As one hand approaches the other it assumes a different configuration, depending on the type of vowel to be articulated. The visual image that is associated with the anchor may be written, appearing in the visual field, or visualized--as a dictionary entry or phonetic transcription of a word.

Whether or not the same "grabbing" principle applies to auditory or somatic images is not mentioned in the research report, but from what we know of the relation between haptic, auditory and visual, one would assume that the effect would be even more "pronounced" with auditory input. Regardless, it points to but another possible explanation for the "gripping" nature of EHIEP!

"Embodiment and Cognitive Science"

Here is a fascinating, extended review of Gibbs (2006) by philosopher, R. Rupert of Colorado University at Boulder. If you are philosophically and "embodimentally" inclined, you will appreciate it. For those who may not be quite there yet, here is a pull-quote from the conclusion of the piece [italics are mine]:

 "In the end, I think research done under the heading of the embodied approach has much to offer more traditional theorists; it pushes cognitive scientists toward considerations that will enhance the traditional program, encouraging its practitioners to build more realistic models (albeit using the standard tools of representation and computation). Time-scales will be smaller. Representations might be sparser in visual processing but more numerous in our conceptual representations (in order to account for the context-dependence of some behavior). Realizations of cognitive states might appear somewhere other than in the brain, or they might appear in different parts of the brain than some theorists would have expected. The pursuit of such a program might yield a clearer picture of how the physical states realizing mental representations come to have that status."

The same could of course be said for the field of pronunciation teaching today. So . . . take your local cognitive phonologist out to lunch! (Unless, of course, he or she is already "there" . . . )

Mirroring, Tracking and Listening

M, T and L are basic tools of pronunciation teaching. It has been assumed for some time that tracking, that is having a learner speak along with a simple audio recording, is something of an overt form of what naturally goes on in the body in listening. There was earlier research that seemed to suggest that the vocal apparatus (mouth, vocal cords, etc.) moved along with the incoming speech at a subliminal level.

Clip art: Clker

Turn outs, according to this research, by Menenti of the University of Glasgow, Hagoort of Radboud University, and Gierhan and Segaert of the Max Planck Institute, summarized by Science Daily, that general listening (without seeing the speaker, "live," visually) does not necessarily involve such sympathetic "vibrations." In other words, the felt sense of listening in some contexts can be decidedly non-somatic or divorced from embodied attention.

That does not mean that tracking is still not a useful technique for assisting learners with the intonation of the language, but clearly, the neuro-physiological rationale may be suspect. This raises several interesting questions related to the complex inter-relationships underlying listening, speaking and pronunciation skills--and how to teach them, especially in adults. The evidence that mirroring, on the other hand, engages the body is unequivocal. That certainly speaks to the HICP/EHIEP--and any pronunciation teaching practitioner who is listening . . .

Haptic leading and (pronunciation) practice: getting into the swing of things

Clip art: Clker

Inspired by the interaction between swing dance partners (where all leading is done haptically, without verbal commands or visual signals), a system where a robot acted as lead and a human as follower was developed to study the nature of haptic-only guidance. What was discovered was that, as long as the partners knew the basic swing dance moves, shared the same "vocabulary," haptic-only leading worked reasonably well. If not, the two could not coordinate their actions effectively.

What that seems to imply is that haptic anchoring is most useful or more potent in HICP work when applying a basic pedagogical movement  pattern (PMP) to new materials (sounds, words or phrases)--not as much in the early, initial phases of learning the PMPs, where being able to see locations in the visual field consistently is critical. In other words, for efficient practice of new material.

As noted in an earlier post, for some learners, anchoring new pronunciation(s) may be better accomplished with eyes closed, without the visual interference, in fact. That integrative process, of moving from patterns to improvisation haptically (Just go with the flow, so to speak.), parallels many kinds of learning, but especially the process of "repairing" incorrect or fossilized pronunciation. For those who have yet to get into the swing of haptic-integrated pronunciation work, the "un-HIP," just pick up a few of the basic steps off the videos, turn down your visual cortex, and follow our lead . . .

Eye dominance and HICP: the "shotgun" approach

For a small percentage of learners and instructors, eye dominance can be problematic. If one is strongly left-eye dominant, some of the  EHIEP protocols and activities can be either ineffective or slightly dis-orienting. EHIEP is based on the concept that discourse prominence, that is phrasal and sentence stress (but not word stress) must be anchored in the right visual field. The reason for that is that, for the right eye dominant, the right visual field and hand are more sensitive and responsive. For an instructor, facing a class, that means that some pedagogical movement patterns have to be done mirror image to what the students will be either doing or observing. Some report they cannot do that effectively.

Up to this point, we have been insisting that the poor, struggling left-eye dominant conform to the majority--most actions terminating in the right visual field. We are now beginning to explore the possibility, perhaps a bit inspired by the Shotgunworld blog, of having the strongly left-eye dominant learner who struggles with the system, instead work to the left, much as does the EHIEP instructor. The advice to the novice "shotgunner" is often to just switch to shooting left-handed. It is not as if  we have been "holding a gun to the head" of some learners . ..  but there are some interesting parallels. It is probably time that we bit the bullet and gave it a shot.

Keeping listening in the picture . . . or out of it!

Clip art: Clker

Several posts have addressed the question of the relationship between learning modalities in general learning and pronunciation teaching. What this important 2010 study by Lavie and Macdonald of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, reported by Science Daily, demonstrates is that in some contexts visual input appears to trump auditory input. In other words, being engaged visually in a task may limit ability to hear critical information.

We know from experience that some highly visual learners may find learning pronunciation especially difficult. This helps to explain why. From whatever source, even stunning visual aids or computer displays, "visual interference" with learning new sounds may be significant. The implication for EHIEP instruction is that haptic and auditory input, key components of  multiple modality instruction--along with a modest amount of video on the side, perhaps, is the best overall learning format. Get the picture . . .or the sound . . . take your pick!