The feeling of how it happens: haptic cognition in (pronunciation) teaching

Am often asked the question as to how "haptic" (movement+touch) can enhance teaching, especially pronunciation teaching. A neat new study by Shaikh, Magana, Neri, Escobar-Castillejos, Noguez and Benes, Undergraduate students’ conceptual interpretation and perceptions of haptic-enabled learning experiences, is "instructive". Specifically, the study,

 " . . . explores the potential of haptic technologies in supporting conceptual understanding of difficult concepts in science, specifically concepts related to electricity and magnetism."

Now aside from the fact that work with (haptic) pronunciation teaching should certainly feel at times both "electric and magnetic", the research illustrates how haptic technology, in this case a joy-stick-like device, can help students more effectively figure out some basic, fundamental concepts. In essence, the students were able to "feel" the effect of current changes and magnetic attraction as various forces and variables were explored. The response from students to the experience was very positive, especially in terms of affirmation of understanding the key ideas involved.

The real importance of the study, however, is that haptic engagement is not seen as simply "reinforcing" something taught visually or auditorily. It is basic to the pedagogical process. In other words, experiencing the effect of electricity and magnetic attraction as the concepts are presented results in (what appears to be) a more effective and efficient lesson. It is experiential learning at its best, where what is acquired is more fully integrated cognition, where the physical "input" is critical to understanding, or may, in fact, precede more "frontal" conscious analysis and access to memory. (Reminiscent, of course, of Damasio's 2000 book: The feeling of how it happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Required reading!)

An analogous process is evident in haptic pronunciation instruction or any approach that systematically uses gesture or rich body awareness. The key is for that awareness, of movement and vibration or resonance, to at critical junctures PRECEDE explanation, modeling, reflection and analysis, not simply to accompany speech or visual display. (Train the body first! - Lessac)

We are doing a workshop in May that will deal with discourse intonation and orientation (the phonological processes that span sentence and conversational turn boundaries). We'll be training participants in a number of pedagogical gestures that later will accompany the speech in that bridging. To see what some of those used for expressiveness look (and feel) like, go here!

KIT






http://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-017-0053-2

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

Getting pronunciation off your chest . . .

Photo: Vimeo via Telegraph.com

This one is too good to pass up. (Hat tip to Brian Teaman!) Leave it to the MIT Media lab (and Heibeck, Hope and Legault) as reported by Kinder at the Telegraph to come up with a vest that will allow you to feel the emotional states of the characters in a book, what they call, "Sensory Fiction." Such "haptic vests" have been around for quite some time but this one is more closely tied to a narrative that can serve "pedagogical" purposes. With the vest on, you experience something of what the character is feeling through a combination of temperature and pressure changes.

All you need for our work is to plug in the audio track and stick on a few mini-speakers around the upper body to make it a great tool for getting the "felt sense" of a sound. Deliver that with a great voice with rich resonance (George Clooney?), especially in a text with a bit more emotional zip than your average pronunciation book. (No great challenge there, of course!) Finally, connect it up to the EHIEP pedagogical movement patterns (gestures + touch) and you have the perfect "Haptic Friction."

Got to get me one of those!

Keep in touch!

Haptic pronunciation teaching as theatre, Part One: PHYSICAL

Probably the best source on the web for connecting up to the wide range of disciplines that work systematically with body movement is the Association of Theatre Movement Educators (ATME). This is Part One of two that explores how to understand EHIEP and AH-EPS training, based on the ATME characterization of both the physical and expressive dimensions of movement training. 

The description of a movement specialist could, with a little (haptic) lexical substitution describe an

Clip art: Ckler

EHIEP "haptician" as well:

" . . . the movement specialist/teacher works with the development of the intuitive and kinaesthetic understanding of the performer. . . . devise(s) a process for creating an articulate body that demonstrates technical proficiency, full physical commitment and ease, along with the integration of physical skills." 

Among the (9) specifics are: (Italics are mine!)

• Teaching of movement skills . . . to increase strength, flexibility, control . . . and as elements of improvisation (Haptic work is especially valuable in integrating new pronunciation and vocabulary into spontaneous speech.) 
• . . . training the body to be emotionally and physically connected to the specifics of the text (This is done in EHIEP with movement, vocal resonance and touch of hands in the visual field, as the text, word or phrase is articulated.) 
• . . . (developing) the ability to inhabit a physical and experiential reality other than one’s own . . . (Although the 3rd parameter, becoming an "actor" in the L2 physical culture, is not an explicit goal of EHIEP work, it is reported consistently by those who work through the complete system. The connection of body representation to identity is foundational in many fields.)

Does that sound like fun? Keep in touch. (AH-EPS v2.0 will be "center stage" shortly!)

In"gender"ing pitch and frequency change in (haptic) pronunciation work

Clip art: 

Ever wondered exactly when change in voice quality created by testosterone therapy during the sex change process signals the transition from X to Y or Y to X when making an 's' sound? (Now stay with me here!) There is a very interesting side to this study by Zimman of CU-Boulder, summarized in a CU-Boulder press release. (Actually, you'll need to keep wondering a little while longer . . . the summary doesn't say what the threshold is exactly but it does highlight the difference between perceived pitch and vocal resonance--and something of how it can be modulated.)

One nice observation: " . . . a voice could have a higher pitch and still be perceived as male if the speaker pronounced “s” sounds in a lower frequency, which is achieved by moving the tongue farther away from the teeth." And a second: "(Vocal) resonance is lower (that is focused more in the upper chest than in their sinuses) for people whose larynx is deeper in their throats, but people learn to manipulate the position of their larynx when they’re young, with male children pulling their larynxes down a little bit and female children pushing them up . . . "

In AH-EPS, rich vocal resonance, whether perceived as more "male" or "female," is essential for effective anchoring of sounds. (That may explain why new or vibrant vocal resonance is often experienced as representative of one's new L2 identity.) Here is one of the haptic video techniques used for enhancing "both ends" of the vocal resonance range. (There is some additional touch involved that is not immediately evident in the video.) 

Clker

Managing the frequency and tongue position of the standard, North American English alveolar "hissing" grooved sibilant ('s'), which helps separate it from "sh" and varieties of the sound that are considerably more fronted than in NAE, is not too difficult either, done "haptically." Notice in the video the effect of the technique in "pulling apart" 's' from 'sh.'  It uses the dynamic hand gestures and sensation of aspiration "touching" the hand initially, along with lip rounding and un-rounding, to guide the tongue either up and back or down and forward in the mouth. 

Does that resonante? If not, pick a different gender and do the videos again. 

Haptic cinema and EHIEP-tic pronunciation training

My discovery of "haptic cinema" and that approach to experiential entertainment and teaching about 6 years ago was a game changer. The integration of the senses, especially the place of perceived texture in that media became the phenomenological model for "haptic-integrated clinical pronunciation," and still is. Here is a great example, "Haptic cinema: a sensory interface to the city."  It is about 11 minutes long. Put on some earphones, sit someplace where you'll have no visual distractions and experience it. 

Clip art: Clker

That is what it should feel like, the felt sense of haptic anchoring in EHIEP instruction, when the learner articulates a sound or word with rich vocal resonance as hands move across the visual field (with some degree of eye tracking) and the hands touch on the stressed vowel--possibly followed by a short continued movement completing an intonation "denouement." 

To prepare for watching it, you might go outside and hug a tree first . . . 

Your pronunciation teaching "going downhill?"

Clip art: Clker

Then some advice from a prominent ski instructor, Robert Forster,  may be just what you are looking for: " . . . stretching [is] the single most important thing people can do for body health maintenance . . . connective tissue shortens with time . . .  We stretch to maintain good alignment of the bones." Most pronunciation instructors would agree that stretching out the muscles of the mouth makes sense but what about all the rest of the muscles of the upper body (and even "lower" body)  involved in speech production that need to be re-oriented for doing new sounds? There are quite a few of the roughly 630 in the body as a matter of fact, especially if you take your haptic-integration seriously, that must be engaged. 

If you are not yet a regular stretcher, just to get you ready for the day, begin with a whole body yoga-type routine, like this one from Biosnyc. And from them, to stretch most everything needed for fluent speaking, other than the mouth muscles,  just do the Cobra, Cow and Cat and you'll be ready to haptic. For a good model of the desired outcome of a good vocal tract warm up, watch this with one by opera singer Jayme Alilaw. By the time she is done, not only her vocal track but her psyche is ready as well. 

Notice Forster's second point about connective tissue "shortenlng with time." The articulatory complex of muscles that produce a sound are no exception, even within a native speaker. To improve public speaking performance, for example, virtually all of the responsible muscles have to be re-activated and stretched beyond their normal speaking range of motion--before they can be retrained. Pronunciation work is no exception. Warm ups can go from me doing the relatively laid back, basic EHIEP warm up to  . . . well. . . .Marsha Chan!

Gola Aperta: Good, good, good, good vibrations . . . and vocal resonance

 Don Jupedo in the character of Harlequin
 jumping down his own throat . . . 

My current project is to develop a new protocol to establish excellent vowel resonance. That is simply critical for effective anchoring. The linked piece by Tracy Watson, which I will quote here, does a very nice job of explaining what it is, the felt sense of it and how it is achieved:

"Gola Aperta [literally: open throat] reflects not only the need for comfort, meaning a healthy, positive amount of muscle antagonism and tension when singing, but also the optimal use of the throat as a resonating body . . . Correct sensation involves an awareness of positive vertical and open space in the throat (like the sensation of breathing in the scent of a flower), and a feeling as though the sound being produced is gently yet energetically filling all of the available space. Depending upon the pitch, one can also feel the intensity of the vibration in different parts of the face. For lower pitches, there is most often a sense of the vibration in the jaw, lips, bridge of the nose, and the lower cheek area. With chest voice present, one may also feel some subglottic and “chest” vibration. As the frequency increases (pitch ascends), there is a sense of awareness of the vibration rising to a higher part of the face, across the bridge of the nose, the cheek area, behind the eyes, between the eyebrows and sometimes in the forehead as well."

Clearly, being able to speak with great resonance impacts more than just pronunciation. For one, it sets up the idea of speaking in a "new voice or identity" one that can be accessed almost as a distinct character or role. For many that construct is extremely helpful in switching to new pronunciation and monitoring ongoing speech. (See several earlier posts on elements of that therapeutic and actor-training strategy.) Once the new protocol is ready I'll post a video so you can try it out with your students. In the meantime, in preparation, get a first rate head and neck massage and practise seeing how much lavender essential oil fragrance you can draw in in one breath . . .