Wednesday, May 1, 2013

R U P? (Txtmsging 4 pronunciation practice persistence)

Clip art:
There are more and more studies on the use of social media in tempting people to engage in healthy,  constructive, persistent behavior, from direction for those with autism to teenage diet. This study by Yun and Arriaga of Georgia Institute of Technology, summarized by Science Daily, demonstrated the same effect with asthmatics: give them advice and reminders daily and they do a better job of managing their health. What is "different" about the procedures used in the study, is that text messages sent daily did not presumably initiate or invite dialogue but "simply" provided information.

Use of social media and technology for instructor-student communication and relationship maintenance is widely reported in language teaching. Some speech and pronunciation professionals and organizations, for example, do regularly send out helpful "advice" to their clients and students. The Yun and Arriaga study is also different in that it is very much programmatic, that is directly related to ongoing, recommended daily "healthy" practices.  In our (haptic-integrated clinical pronunciation) work, it would mean sending out to students in a class a group text message, using an application such as GroupMe, reminding them of how they should be pr
acticing.

That is, in fact, also the recommended format for managing homework in the AH-EPS system. For example, a typical, daily or three times weekly text message attempting to keep students on track might  look something like this: wrmp, pract 1, pract 2, 2x6, wrdlst 1, wrdlst 2

Clker
1. wrmp (Do your warm up!)
2. pract 1 (Practice key strategies of the previous module.)
3. pract 2 (Practice new strategies of this module.)
3. 2x6 (Practice using new strategies in a written dialogue.)
4. wrdlst 1 (Practice last module's targeted word and phrase list.)
5. wrdlst 2 (Practice this module's targeted word and phrase list.)

Recommendation: Try that!
Suggestions: Report here if you do or when you do?
Reminder: Keep in touch!




No comments:

Post a Comment