Conference: How Memory, the Brain, and our Emotions Affect the Acquisition of English Pronunciation
/How to improve English pronunciation. i spent another intellectually stimulating day with PRONSIG and leading researchers and professors from Japan to the USA. During the conference, we learned about how our minds really work when acquiring English pronunciation, and how we as practitioners can support our students.
For me, the highlights were:
Wonderful talks from neuroscientists and speech pathologists on how the brain learns sounds (English vowels and consonants), the process of retention (working and long-term memory), the influence of learning multiple languages, and the different word stress patterns across languages.
Language ego was a new concept to me. In general, the larger the ego, the greater the pronunciation issues identified in the learner’s second language, in this case, English. From experience, this is often the case with French (rather than Belgian French or Belgian Flemish speakers) learners who seem to have the impression that the world should be able to cope with their mispronunciation, although they themselves have difficulty understanding others, for example, Spanish or Indian speakers of English.
My moment of realisation was discovering there was a scientific name for the state I find many of my clients suffer from, Foreign language anxiety (FLA). Language learning can be especially stressful and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the business context. Three reasons have been identified to cause FLA: testing, communication apprehension, and fear of negative evaluation. Presentation anxiety at its worst.
The symptoms my clients present are poor eye contact, shaky voice, a brain taht goes blank, trembling hands, and a moist handshake. All of my coaching tools are required to reduce the fear and stress to allow the brain to quieten and allow the learning pathways to open. This is key to boosting confidence in public speaking as a non-native English speaker, an essential skill for most professionals.