​AH-EPS

Here are a few comments from EHIEP/AH-EPS instructors and students: 

 

"I learned EHIEP (AH-EPS) in 2009-2010. I used the warm up and and vowel techniques with students. Recently, I held an elective class for one year that went over the entire system in Tokyo. One Japanese student told me several months after taking the class that "Haptic" was a turning point in his English language learning. He felt like he had been stuck on a plateau for years until he started making progress with his pronunciation, thanks to Haptic"  P T.
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One of the most popular PMPs (pedagogical movement patterns) in the AH-EPS system is called the "Rhythm FIght Club" or "Conversational Rhythm Fight Club."  Basically, the learner punches and jabs on words and phrases, holding a tennis ball to squeeze (best choice) to work on changing to faster, more conversational style. (It also compacts the words and inserts more processing time for the listener.) I did an hour long session on the CRFC in Korea a few years ago with an audience of about 300 students. Maybe half their instructors attended. The next day, there were several reports from instructors who had not attended that the students' speech style, rhythm and speed were noticeably different the next day: faster, stronger, more confident. (The boxing gestures in class the next couple of days did seem a little odd, nonetheless.) We have used that technique dozens of times since. Never fails. BA
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In one of the early classes where the system was piloted, I had an older Chinese student with very problematic pronunciation who had been here for a couple of decades. Among many other "problems" he had was the distinction between [i] and [I], a common issue with Chinese. The pedagogical movement patterns for those two vowels are very different. [i] is actually done as [i+y] with a tap and then long sweeping motion of the hand as the [y] is articulated. [I], on the other hand, is performed with a quick, light tap to the other hand, in a position about 3 inches lower in the visual field. The next week he came back with a long list of words with those two vowels in them which he could pronounce almost perfectly. Furthermore, he said that he was pretty sure that he was even using some of them correctly in conversation already! And the reason? (His words) "I just didn't know how different they were. I can really feel the difference now."  I was impressed . . . and inspired! NK
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A few years back, I published an article that, in part, examined my first experience with using our haptic approach to pronunciation teaching, as documented in a pronunciation journal I kept at the time. Probably the most relevant quote from the article is the following: "I wrote in my pronunciation journal that tactile and ‘‘kinesthetic teaching [was] SOOO much easier to communicate to low-level students!’’ A lot of the difficulties that I had experienced in the past seemed to be overcome by following the [haptic] system. As a result, teaching vowels, sentence stress, and intonation was easier for me that semester in comparison with previous semesters" (p. 282). From: Baker, A. A. (2011). Discourse prosody and teachers' stated beliefs and practices. TESOL Journal, 2(3), 263-292.
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"As a pre-service teacher, I'm always looking for new ways to teach pronunciation in ESL/EFL classes. While learning Bill's HAPTIC methods in the fall of 2012, I was tutoring a friend from Mexico to pass his IELTS. Ivan and I focused solely on "rough vowels". It was only two classes before Ivan understood the kinaesthetic relationship between his hands and the shape of his mouth. Even though we only practiced Bill's methods for rough vowels for three classes, months later, I can still position my hand in the air and Ivan will know which vowel I'm referring to. This methods is invaluable." EM