Commitment- Doorway to Clear English Mastery
Commitment Doorway 17 to Clear English Mastery
Article 17 for series Elements of Clear English Speech Mastery
Hey you, nonnative speaker of English, what’ll get you to change to clear, not “What did you say?” English?
Key to new learning, new habit is commitment, past and present.
First, social bonds to family or school or workplace or church light the way to stir to action. Gotta have motivation for new systematic muscle learning. Gotta be impelled for perseverance. Gotta be propelled to make habit the clear speech mode and accurate enunciation of AE (American English).
Enter Social Bonding Theory’s four processes: commitment, involvement, attachment and belief: the light to efficient and durable learning.
Efficient versus takes forever? Easy choice.
Durable versus gone-after-training? Double-easy choice.
Enter Social Bonding Theory’s processes that encourage vital behavior patterns that make thrive social groups and individuals.
Take the process of Commitment.
High success to get clear and easy to understand AE requires time, focus, effort and perseverance.
High success needs sound logic to commit.
It needs systematic learning, not just learning on inefficient unorganized or need-to-know basis.
Want sound logic? Diagnostic assessment fits the bill.
First tell us and yourself: what’s your learning already? Current skill? Needs, desires? For present, for future? That’s personal stake.
Then show what you’ve got: a dozen oral skills.
Numbers, numbers: what’s the meaning of measurements? How do you compare to non-native and native-born speakers of AE? Which are your error sounds? Intonation skills? Written word to pronunciation rules skill?
One size does not fit all ‘cause different reasons for diversity. Too soft speech because of muscle strength. or mother tongue habit, or your-choice habit? Errors in AE speech sounds due to using tongue, lips, teeth, larynx in mother- tongue fashion? Or habit of slurring words together? Or ignorance of AE pronunciation rules? Gotta get the six “whys” to know the six “hows” for acquiring effective fresh skills.
Whopper encouragement comes from the dreaded “What”, “What did you say?”. Or from self-pursuit of life choices, pursuit of uplifted social engagement, applying to grad school, career lift. Frequent incentive is supervisor ask to get better English speech at beginning of job or yearly review. The more sparks the better to fuel commitment to clear AE short-term course of learning.
Strange but true: self-pay versus sponsor-pay doesn’t seem to make a heck of a lot of difference. Ack, money’s worth a lot, but time and effort the precious more.
Circle back: Commitment for adults comes first from current bonds to familial, educational or school, workplace, church or ethical group. Over-18ers already have drivers for motivation and behavior patterns from these.
Now gotta get Commitment to short-term course of learning. After that get ignited involvement, attachment, belief.
What’s the short-term course for clear English mastery?
Seventy days of daily deliberate practice. That is the average to get every day habits. 1*. Ten weeks times seven days. Assessment and feedback makes twelve weeks total, same as semesters or quarters in academia.
Deliberate practice means not mindless and deliberate accuracy. It’s not practice makes perfect, but perfect practice makes perfect. 2
Want skill durability? Get with distributed or spaced schedule. Throw in massed practice, add deep learning. Thus the Clear English Mastery recipe with icing. Works every time.
Effortful, you’re dern right. Gotta make motor memory strong in the brain. Plus gotta batten down, inhibit. the old way. Accented English be gone.
There’s more. Commitment needs notable inducement for investing time, energy, the self in an activity path. Social Bonding Theory says inducement ideally is immediate desirable position or outcome and realistic promise of status in near future.
Immediate inducement is successful talk: listener gets it the first time. Gone is “What?”, the quizzical look.
Realistic promise of status in near future? Could be getting satisfying projects at work or at school. Could be promotions; could be landing job. Could be approving nod of colleague, friend, family member. Mastery is laudable.
Clear English is downright beautiful.
Next time- The social bonding process of involvement – what you’ve gotta do!
References:
- Lally, Phillippa; Van Jaarsveld, Cornelia H. M; Potts, Henry, W.W.Wardle; Jane, How are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the real World, European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 998-1009, University College London, London UK (2010) The time it took participants to reach 95% of their asymptote of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days, average 66 days. 62 individuals. As evidenced in the study, many participants found it easier to adopt the habit of drinking a glass of water at breakfast than do 50 sit-ups after morning coffee.
- Famous quotation of Jack Nicolaus, golf master and icon.
- Copyright 2024 Clear Talk Mastery, Inc
Word Memory- What You Don’t Know!
Get Ahead of the Curve
Speed Up Learning
Article 14
Saying Words Out Loud
Robust evidence indicates that saying a word out loud makes it more memorable than simply reading it silently or hearing someone else say it. This memory benefit of “hearing oneself” (and producing the word) is referred to as the production effect. The results of studies indicate that oral production is beneficial because it involves two different components: speaking (a motor act) and hearing oneself (the self-referential auditory input). (1) (2) (3)
Amazing Effect of Accurate Reading Aloud on Accurate English Pronunciation
Speech intelligibility increases dramatically when native-born English speaking children learn to read and spend more time reading. Five-to-six-year-old English learners have vocabularies of 2,500 to 5,000 words and add 5,000 words per year for the first several years of schooling. (4) (5)
For adult nonnative-born individuals who want acquisition of clear English pronunciation, reading aloud accurately words, phrases and sentences is an ideal vehicle for increasing accuracy of pronunciation for helping to make accurate pronunciation habitual.
It is in reading words that English communicators learn, for example, that there are different meanings for “hit” and “hid” or “hot” and hat” or “bottle” and “battle” or “virus” and “various” or “kind” and “kin”. Or the embarrassing pronunciation mistakes of “focus” and “f*ck us,” or “beach” and “b*tch”.
Amazing Effect of Accurate Reading Aloud on Comprehension of English Words and Sentences
Just as the comprehension of English words increases exponentially when native-born children learn to read and spend more time reading, nonnative-born persons who increase the intelligibility or accurate pronunciation of English words report that their understanding of spoken English also greatly improves. Likely, the oral production which is a motor act and involves the component of the brain for oral speaking generates memory and recognition growth for hearing and processing English speech. (1) (2).
An example involves a south Korean-born person who had been working on her Ph D for philosophy in the United States for about three years when she first started working with us. She came to her coaching during her Course 2 incredibly happy. That very week she watched broadcast news report in English and turned off the English subtitles and found that finally she could understand English spoken news report!
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Now some information for just about everyone who needs to understand and speak multiple syllable words—for social conversation, current broadcast news vocabulary, and especially work vocabulary.
Learning and Memorizing English Words
According to research whole-word memorization is “labor-intensive” requiring on average about 35 repetitions or trials per word. This strategy of 35 repetitions of a word consecutively or in “one sitting” is called massed practice and is excellent for human memory.
Phonics advocates — who argue that learning decoding rules or patterns substantially affects the efficiency of learning to read accurately, –say that most words are decodable, so relatively few words have to be memorized. (6)
Typical Inefficient Learning Strategy for ESLers Learning to Speak English
In our interview with new student-learners for more than 20 years, we ask how they learned to speak English. Most reported learning by imitating the teacher and memorizing pronunciation of words. Rarely were their English teachers native-born English speakers, so the pronunciation was accented English—Chinglish, Spanglish, German accented, Arabic accented, etc. Nowadays, more ESL students are reporting that they also used audio recorded lessons where imitation, of course, is the name of the game.
Irregular English Words – Optimal Learning Strategy
Notably, irregular words which do not follow the typical four syllable rules or types for written words present a substantial challenge. Research in 2018 concluded that “fully-alphabetical students” learn irregular words more easily when they use a process called hierarchical decoding. (8) “Fully-alphabetical students” are those who are fluent in the pronunciation of the 25 English consonants and 14 vowel sounds. Hierarchical decoding means to focus attention on the irregular elements such as a vowel-digraph where there is a silent e such as break (b-r-ea-k) or great (g-r-ea-t) where the “e” is silent, or height (h-eigh-t) where the “e” and “gh” are silent). In essence, teachers and tutors should teach decoding with more advanced vowel patterns before expecting English communication learners, including young native-born readers to tackle irregular verbs. These words requiring hierarchical decoding are also called “word families.”
Question- Why Didn’t My English Teachers Teach Me These Rules or Approaches to Decoding English Written Words?
The simple answer is that they didn’t know the rules or approaches.
Take Home Messages?
What are the take-home messages for this article?
First, accurate reading with your voice of words, phrases and sentences are excellent routes to increasing the accuracy of spoken American English (using deliberate practice and distributed or spaced schedule of practice).
Second, remember from the preceding blog article that reading (similar to speaking from your brain and not accompanying reading written words) involves more than six separate areas of the brain which must be coordinated together.
Third, memorizing the pronunciation of words (it takes about 35 repetitions for each word) is called massed practice. Consecutively and accurately repeating with your voice an important and difficult word is an excellent use for massed practice mode of learning. But to get those words into long-term memory requires distributed or spaced schedule of learning.
However massed practice of 35 repetitions is a downright impossible task for the vocabulary needed for fluent English (30,000 to 65,000 words average vocabulary for native-born English speaking adults). This gets to the obvious need for using better strategies for learning accurate English pronunciation (aiming for fluency, perhaps, of 30,000 to 65,000 vocabulary words for fluent English).
Use these better strategies or approaches —-
Systematically, learn the rules for pronunciation for English words, also called phonics approaches. Begin with learning the letter to speech sound relations. (9)
Then add English pronunciation for English syllable types of open syllables, digraph syllables, silent e syllables and closed syllables.
Then learn the most frequently accurate 8 rules for dividing written multiple syllable words into syllables. Recall that professional words are usually multiple syllable. Once these rules for the four syllable word types and 8 most frequent rules for dividing English words into syllables are fully integrated in your memory (you are a fully “alphabetized learner”), then systematically learn hierarchical decoding for irregular English words.
The key? Structuring the learning.
What you just got is a super quick summary of our research and development for more than 20 years at Clear Talk Mastery.
P.S. Why so many irregular words? Because English is a polyglot language which means it has borrowed words from many languages. The first immigrants into the British Isle brought proto-German with them, then Norse came with the Vikings from Scandinavia, followed by Norman conquest of the British Isle and many French words. With the explosion of science knowledge,
Footnotes for blog
- Colin M MacLeod (December 18, 2011). “I said, you said: the production effect gets personal.”Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 18 (6): 1197–1202
- William R. Klemm (December 15, 2017). “Enhance Memory with the “Production Effect”. Psychology today”.
- “Study finds reading information aloud to yourself improves memory. University of Waterloo”.. December 1, 2017.
- Hustad, K.C. et al Speech Development Between 30 and 119 Months in Typical Children I: Intelligibility Growth Curves for Single-Word and Multiword Productions, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Oct. 4, 2021.
- “Inference, says Clare Sealy, isn’t a skill that can be taught. But it can be improved-through knowledge. ResearchED.. 24 June 2019.
- Murray, Bruce; McIlwain, Jane (2019). “How do beginners learn to read irregular words as sight words”. Journal of Research in Reading. 42 (1): 123–136.
- “Orthographic mapping. Reading rockets”.. 19 September 2019.
- Murray, B., et al, How Do Beginners Learn to Read Irregular Words as Sight Words, Journal of Research in Reading , July 4, 2018
- Linnea C. Ehri (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18L1,5-21, D01 in “Orthographic mapping. Reading rockets”.. 19 September 2019
Copyright 2023 Clear Talk Mastery, Inc
Amazing Effect of Vocal Reading on Pronunciation
Did You Know?
Writing is only about 5,500 years old, unlike human speech estimated to be from 50,000 years to 2 million years old. In contrast to speech, the human brain did not naturally evolve to read. Thus, the brain adapts to the challenge of reading.
The Amazing Effect of Accurate Vocal Reading on Accurate English Pronunciation Article 13
English speech intelligibility increases sharply for North American children when they learn to read. For adult nonnative-born individuals who want acquisition of clear English, reading words, phrases and sentences is an ideal vehicle for helping to learn accurate English pronunciation.
It is in reading words that the speakers learns that there are different meanings for “hit” and “hid,” or “hot” and “hat,” “bottle” and “battle,” “kin” and kind,” “beach” and “b*tch” which rhymes with “witch”.
And in oral reading or reading with your voice, the human being learns that the spelling of the English word most frequently corresponds to the accurate pronunciation.
The process of reading involves most of the brain, especially an interconnection between visual areas and language areas. And importantly reading also involves neural systems related to action, emotion, decision making and memory.
Big alert! The sensorimotor cortex of the brain is the most active region of the brain during reading. A seminal MRI study in 2014 involving adults and children, where bodily movement was restricted, demonstrated strong evidence revealing that this region may be correlated with automatic word processing and decoding. Specifically, this area of the brain was highly active in persons new to the English language, as well as those children learning to read, and those children struggling to read (dyslexia).
Brain Regions Used for Reading?
Here is the description from Wikipedia (Reading):
The occipital and parietal lobes are involved for orthographic processing of visual words
The two major regions of the brain associated with phonological skills (speech sounds) are the temporal-parietal region and the Perisylvian Region (in MRI study, 2001).
The Perisylvian Region, which is the region of the brain believed to connect Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, is another region highly active during phonological activities when participants are asked to verbalize known and unknown words.
The inferior frontal region is active in several reading related activities associated with comprehension and processing skills such as spelling and working memory.
In addition to regions on the cortex considered gray matter on MRIs, several white matter fasciculus are active during different reading activities. These three white matter regions connect the three respected cortex regions as the brain reads thus these regions are responsible for the brain’s cross-model integration involved in reading. These are the left arcuate faciculus, the left inferior longitudinal faciculus, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus.
The cerebellum, which is not part of the cerebral cortex, is also believed to play an important role in reading. The role of automatization, word accuracy, and reading speed is associated with the cerebellum.
Have you wondered why learning to speak clear English feels so hard? A principal reason is that your brain is working hard to access and coordinate a good number of separate brain regions!”
Article 13, Blog, copyright 2023 Clear Talk Mastery, Inc