Making the Case for Brain-friendly Pronunciation Instruction

Introduction

A growing empirical research base has contributed substantially to the understanding of the effectiveness of pronunciation instruction and of second language (L2) instructors’ practices, beliefs, and knowledge about pronunciation in the language classroom. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, how neuroscience can serve to inform pronunciation teaching and learning has not been explored in depth to date. Neuroscience offers important insights into how our brain processes suprasegmentals (stress, rhythm, and intonation) for us to make sense of new and old information (Hagoort, 2019). Inappropriately applied suprasegmental features, for example, often inhibit an interlocutor’s ability to process and understand the intended message. The aim of this article is, therefore, to further the process of bringing insights from neuroscience into pronunciation instruction. I first explore several neuroscientific principles that are fundamental to pronunciation and then provide an example of an approach that reflects a number of those principles: haptic pronunciation instruction.

Neuroscience and Pronunciation Instruction

In the past two decades, neuroscientific research has contributed to our understanding that the brain is a social organ and therefore requires social interaction for it to remain active and stimulated for neural plasticity (i.e. learning) to occur (Cozolino and Sprokay, 2006). From a pedagogical point of view, for instance, that seems to imply that students, where possible, should not study in isolation since social connectedness is essential to – or at least enhances – learning. Importantly, as Cozolino (2013: 150) argues, “[t]he messages we send one another are received by the senses and converted into electrochemical signals within the social networks of the receiver’s brain.” Thus, socially interactive tasks that allow students to take risks and experiment with and discover content are viewed as critical for student learning, as these social discovery-driven activities cause neurons to fire and make new connections, which, in turn, consolidates existing pathways in the brain. That is, new memories are formed, recalled, and reconsolidated in richer learning environments involving social connectedness that further enhances learning.

Teachers’ interpersonal skills are essential in the creation of a rich learning environment in which brain development is stimulated (Cozolino and Sprokay, 2006). The opposite is also true: fewer neurons fire and less learning takes place if the social connection in the classroom is poor or non-existent. Pronunciation teaching must, therefore, go beyond the commonly used and potentially socially isolating ‘repeat after me’ and similar techniques, and include opportunities for social support. That may take the form of pair or group work to enable students to discover and experience the sound system collaboratively.

Because the brain is by its very nature a pervasively social organ, emotions play a defining role in teaching and learning. As Cozolino (2013) points out, humor and laughter, for instance, can serve to improve memory recall, increase attention, and reduce anxiety, stress, depression and loneliness. Having fun in class relaxes muscles and increases heart rate, which, in turn, stimulates circulation, exercises lungs and chest muscles, and improves respiration and, subsequently, learning. Additionally, emotions mediate a teacher’s beliefs, knowledge, and practices (Cheung and Hennebry-Leung, online first) and mirror neurons in the brain enable us to be in tune with other people’s emotions and actions, including their facial expressions and gestures. As a consequence of this mirror neuron-based system, teachers’ emotions can impact the affective states of students in the classroom. The exact role of mirror neurons is a debated issue in neuroscience (Dickerson et al., 2017; Ferrari and Rizzolatti, 2014), but a positive, energetic, and passionate teacher is likely to be infectious in motivating students to learn, whereas a stressed, or subconsciously biased practitioner may produce the opposite effect.

Stress (or negative emotions such as anxiety or fear) can affect students, too. Even though excitement or a sense of accomplishment (i.e. beneficial stress called eustress) can augment motivation and student learning in the short term, continuous and higher stress levels cause the amygdala – “an emotional switch station” (Willis and Willis, 2020: 34) close to the center of the brain – to react negatively. This reaction reduces the activity of the prefrontal cortex, which, in turn, inhibits the recall of facts. Put differently, ongoing and high-level stress, from any number of sources, not only changes the efficiency and neuronal structure of the brain, but also it impedes the construction and retainment of new memories, as well as student behavior and can serve to undermine the learning process.

Emotions also feature prominently in pronunciation (e.g. Rummer et al., 2014), with some suggesting that pronunciation instruction should be fun and mutually enjoyable (e.g. Acton, 2021). Creating such a classroom atmosphere is said to be especially important as pronunciation work can take considerable time and effort until students notice improvement, often resulting in frustration and stress along the way. Having a positive classroom environment is important for students to feel comfortable and develop intelligible pronunciation because negative emotions often result in lasting, unfavorable memories that can impede learning. Strategically monitoring students’ ‘windows of stress’ should therefore be of paramount importance in pronunciation teaching.

The mind-brain-body connection is now a widely accepted concept in neuroscience. As Robson (2019: 100) asserts, “[w]ithout input from your body, your mind would be unable to generate a sense of self or process emotions properly.” Movement (especially exercise) is thus seen as an effective means to reduce stress, in part because it triggers the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for satisfaction and pleasure. When muscles are moving, the brain also receives signals to pay attention and learn, and movement contributes to the birth of new neurons (i.e. neural plasticity) in the hippocampus (Cozolino, 2013). At the same time, movement likely increases learning or cognitive function because increased blood flow carries away neurotoxins in the brain. Yet, cognitive tasks and physical activity are often understood to be relatively unrelated in many educational contexts and frameworks, standing in contrast to growing empirical evidence that the systematic integration of movement in the classroom leads to more effective student learning and retention of content (Ruiter et al., 2015).

The importance of movement in learning aligns with the notion that pronunciation is, in a significant sense, a strongly kinesthetic activity (Acton, 2021). That is, effective pronunciation instruction should enable students to experience segmentals (vowels, consonants) and suprasegmentals through movement. One example is to have students stand up on a prominent word in a thought group or respond kinesthetically to a sound they hear in a minimal pair activity (see Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, for other practical suggestions). Other kinesthetic pronunciation activities may include the acting out of syllables, including stress, rhythm, and intonation in words and utterances (Acton, 1998), as well as the warming-up and activation of learners’ bodies to connect the physical with student emotions prior to any pronunciation work (Playsted et al., 2020). The point is that movement, when applied appropriately and systematically, should increase brain activity and promote processing and acquisition of new information and skills.

Neuroscience suggests that touch is the most common and powerful sense for people to interact with their physical environment (see Linden, 2015; Minogue and Jones, 2006). The skin and its receptor system send information to the brain through touch, making it fundamental to one’s engagement with physical surroundings. Touch enhances learning and produces detailed, lasting memories (Hutmacher and Kuhbandner, 2018). Research has also revealed that touch increases learner confidence more effectively than does vision, particularly in ambiguous phonological situations such as students trying to distinguish between, for example, the North American English vowel sounds [ij] (e.g. me) and [eɪ] (e.g. May) (Fairhurst et al., 2018). Yet, touch is “surprisingly little used as a vehicle for conceptual learning, particularly in higher education” (Shaikh et al., 2017: 2). With perhaps the exceptions of instructors clapping hands (Zhang et al., 2020) and the use of smartphones (e.g. Liakin et al., 2015) to help improve L2 learners’ pronunciation, touch is more or less an unexplored area in pronunciation instruction. From an embodiment point of view of L2 teaching and learning (Holme, 2012), intentional use of touch should be present since it complements movement in the creation of meaning.

Neuroscience provides intriguing evidence for the role that the aforementioned sensory-motor aspects (i.e. movement and touch) play in the learning of content and mastery of new skills. Attention and motivation are, of course, also important in learning, but to strengthen the connections between existing neurons and to facilitate deep learning and the consolidation of memory, including the transfer of new content from working memory to long-term memory, carefully designed and configured repetition and exposure is still essential (Burns, 2019). Put differently, repeating an activity in some form is critical for memory formation, storing, and recall (Cozolino, 2013) and embodied practice facilitates automaticity. Automatization – defined in neuroscience as the ability to perform an activity while at the same time carrying out a different task without direct attention – is believed to underlie improved performance (Knowland and Thomas, 2014). In pronunciation instruction, automatization is seen as an important path to improving fluency and accuracy (Gatbonton and Segalowitz, 2005). Thus, giving students opportunities to encounter and interact with phonological features in a variety of different communicative tasks, progressing from controlled, to guided, and free activities (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010), and, at the same time, incorporating emotions, movement, and touch helps create optimal classroom conditions that can maximize pronunciation work. One example of an approach to how this may be achieved is haptic pronunciation teaching.

Practical Application: Haptic Pronunciation Teaching

The preceding section brought together several interconnected neuroscientific principles and pronunciation instruction. Yet, contemporary pronunciation teaching tends to be often fragmented in that it seldom draws on more than one principle at a time. In other words, for pronunciation instruction to be effective, it needs to be more ’brain-friendly’, especially since pronunciation is inherently embodied; that is, the articulation of sounds (i.e. pronunciation) requires movement and not just knowledge of content. Haptic pronunciation teaching (Acton et al., 2013) illustrates a potentially more integrated, systematic ‘amalgamation’ of those principles.

The underlying premise of this haptic approach (hereafter ‘haptics’) is that the entire body is and must be engaged in pronunciation teaching and learning. Haptics also takes a phonological, rhythmic-based perspective on pronunciation instruction. That is, the thought group forms the foundation with movement and touch being anchored on the peak vowel in the most prominent word (i.e. prominence) of that thought group. For example, the first syllable in the word ‘ a pples’ is likely to be stressed more strongly than the other two words (or syllables) in the following thought group: / I like a pples /. On the vowel sound [æ], phonology (clear, intelligible pronunciation) and semantics (meaning) are brought together through movement and touch. It should be noted that although greater stress on ‘apples’ is probably the most common way this short sentence is uttered, any of the three words could, in principle, carry prominence depending on the context and the speaker’s intended meaning.

Because meaning – or new information – in English is conveyed through key words (see Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, for a comprehensive overview), haptics focuses on prominent words and thus enhances learners’ language awareness, production (pronunciation), and reception (listening) (Mister & Burri, 2019). Attending to the peak vowel in a prominent word also augments the connection between emotions – often communicated through vowel sounds – and pronunciation (Ladefoged, 2005). From a neuroscientific point of view, making this link is important, as “there is no cognition without emotion” (Cozolino, 2013: 74). Moreover, the different visual, semantic, sensory-motor, and emotional neural networks contain their own memory systems, and therefore a multi-channel type of learning approach with several access routes to information, such as haptics, attempts to enhance memory, storage, and recall because “[n]eurons that fire together form functional connections that lead to new learning” (Cozolino, 2013: 159)

The current version of the haptic system (it continues to evolve) comprises approximately two dozen techniques in which affect (e.g. emotions), movement, and touch are combined to teach pronunciation systematically. The techniques feature “specific movements accompanied by touch, referred to as pedagogical movement patterns (PMPs)” (Burri and Baker, 2019: 98). Six representative techniques are:

Students are initially introduced to and then trained in one technique at a time, which usually takes about 2 to 5 minutes and is typically chosen based on learner needs. If rhythm is a problem, for instance, the teacher might start off with the Tai Ball Chi, or if intonation causes difficulties for the learners, the class could just focus on the Touchinami to help learners experience and work with some of the problematic intonation patterns. In this controlled training phase (as well as in later correction and feedback provision), the students mirror the instructors’ PMPs. This mirroring is important for “mirror neurons link visual and motor programs, turning observations into rehearsal” (Cozolino, 2013: 141). That is, students learn by observing and doing these PMPs with the teacher. The aim of this introductory and training phase is to create a safe and trusting classroom environment for learners to experience the techniques (students are never forced to participate), and, at the same time, ensure a low stress level and decrease the social distance between instructor and students, contributing to brain plasticity and learning.

Following this initial phase, students are typically given a dialogue to practice the PMPs in a guided and communicative role-play scenario. That dialogue will have thought groups and the stressed vowels of stressed words within those groups identified. Dialogues can be taken from commercially published textbooks or written by the instructor, but more importantly, for them to become memorable, a dialogue needs to feature a good and relevant story, perhaps one that is humorous to evoke students’ emotions. In the last phase (i.e. the free phase), students are often given some open-ended questions with which they can interview their peers while using the PMPs and incorporate the target feature into their more spontaneous speech. Arranging the three phases in this particular way aligns with the notion that explicit instruction and pedagogical scaffolding in the classroom lowers students’ cognitive load and therefore facilitates learning (Sweller et al., 2011). Once students have progressed through these three phases, a technique can be integrated into the regular language curriculum, for correction and spontaneous feedback, with relative ease.

An important aspect of haptics is its novel nature. The brain reacts to novelty in that it releases dopamine during pleasurable situations and experiences (Morrens et al., 2020). An increased level of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex area augments working memory and facilitates attention, focus, and learning. This then provides a plausible explanation for some of my recent research showing practitioners’ positive reactions to being trained in haptics (Burri and Baker, 2019), and also for the countless occasions my colleagues and I have witnessed great L2 learner enthusiasm and engagement when they were introduced to haptics.

Conclusion

It must be noted, that from a neuroscientific standpoint, the commonly held belief that pronunciation teaching is ineffective with adult learners because a speaker’s pronunciation is set by the age of seven is outdated. As Cozolino (2013: 24) points out, “[t]he truth is that our brains never stop maturing and possess the capacity for lifelong neural plasticity.” Each learner’s brain is unique, and “learning capacity changes during the lifespan” of a learner (Knowland and Thomas, 2014: 107), but the brain continues to be plastic into adulthood with new neural pathways constantly being formed, enabling adult learners to acquire new knowledge and skills. This encouraging finding in conjunction with a brain-friendly approach such as haptics promises to position L2 teachers well to create a learning environment that promotes the formation of neural pathways and thus engages the embodied process of L2 learners achieving clear, intelligible pronunciation.