“For the past 12 years, I’ve generally been focused on working with ESL students to improve their speaking and pronunciation skills.  In my time with those students, I found that there was a real lack of kinesthetic and visual learning tools to help students navigate the spoken English language.  After being introduced to the haptic learning system during my Master’s studies, I started to apply the concepts in my classroom. 

Students picked up the movements quickly and I could see increased motivation and interest in the classroom as they “danced” their way to improved speaking skills.  The haptics system is especially helpful for remote learners who spend most of their time in front of a computer with little time to interact with classmates and use movement to learn.  The movement offered in my speaking and pronunciation classes gives my students the opportunity to practice and learn in a more meaningful way – haptics makes their learning experience more enjoyable, memorable, and effective.” 

-Joan Harwig

“Just like his fellow Iraqi students at my LINC 2 class, George applied Arabic intonation patterns to all his English sentences, making it hard for others to identify if he was asking a question or stating a fact. His old age, along with always being accompanied by his wife and other Arabic speakers, might have had a great impact on his ability to progress. He also put little effort into speaking English inside or outside the classroom, which might explain why he spent more than four years in CLB 2. Any encounter on the hallway was done quickly by him nodding his head and saying, “Hello teacher!”, or it was lengthened by his wife’s stories about his day. When I first introduced the Haptic system to the class, I was able to get an instant access to his brain, activating the pathway to his Broca.

It became a routine to start the day with the HAPTIC warmup. Despite being the oldest, George was the most active student, exaggerating every sound and every movement. He was not embarrassed anymore by his fractured front teeth. He was fascinated by the Touchinami protocol. Only during this exercise that he was the loudest in class, with raised eyebrows, widened eyes, and slightly dropped jaw that turned into a smile as he started demonstrating the sounds. He moved his arms robustly, not being able to match the instructor’s smooth moves; however, he was enjoying every bit of it.

After two classes with HAPTIC practice, our hallway meetings took a dramatic shift. His “Hello teacher” was uplifted by a big smile and a demonstration of a Touchinami move. He started adding other statements and questions such as “How are you teacher?” And “That’s very good.” All were accompanied by gestures. It seemed as if he wanted to produce more English only to have fun doing the Touchiname moves. George became more active during groups speaking activities. He demonstrated the moves, reminding the other students to use them as well. He didn’t mind it when I kept reminding him that his hands should touch at the end of every move. He always smiled and said, “Yes teacher.” He was extremely proud of himself, and I was thrilled to witness the transformation of his attitude towards English learning.”

-Nowar Habash

"In Japan, students are traditionally reserved. Fearful of standing out from the crowd, they tend to be hesitant to step off the well worn path and out of their comfort zone. Yet even here, the benefits of the Haptic System are so obvious, students soon shake off their inhibitions and take to it like a duck to water.

Each year, when my new cohort arrives, the first Haptic lesson is usually met by reticence and embarrassment. But when the more adventurous of the learners take the leap of faith - and start to immediately see the improvements to their English pronunciation - the rest of the class soon break out of their shells, and it's not long before my students are walking the halls, pronunciation sticks in hand, demonstrating to other classes their newfound skills, much to the envy of their Haptic-less peers.

It's almost as if they have discovered fire for the first time, and can't wait to show off their new discovery. That is the transformative power of Dr. Acton's Haptic System."

-David Bishop

“The Fight club is my go-to haptoid for imprinting phrasal stress in my student's bodies. When they are sounding really staccato with their English productions, a few good punches in the right place helps get them on the right path. Acton's butterfly is the best way to get syllables and word stress all in one neat little package. Japanese students have a tendency to make several syllables out of any consonant cluster. They also add vowels to final consonants. The butterfly technique puts them in touch with the shape and pattern of syllables and teaches them to experience syllables the way that native speakers do and thereby avoid those pesky intrusive vowels. No classroom should be without the butterfly to help students spread their wings and flutter from reduced syllables to secondary and primary syllable stress as if they were born in Dublin.”

-Brian Teaman

“In the last decade or so in the graduate courses in applied phonology, the final term paper has included a requirement that the student “try out” or at least demonstrate how two or more haptic pronunciation techniques could be integrated into the course materials that they were using at the time. From those 100+ sets of lesson plans, the idea of “content-based pronunciation teaching” gradually emerged. The key idea became that the content itself (maybe a dialogue or reading or listening comprehension passage, or even a simply vocabulary list) suggested which type of Movement, tone and touch pattern (MTTP) would be most effective in enhancing the text in terms of expressiveness or “memorable-ness,” or improving its clarity—something more like traditional pronunciation work.

Eventually, it had completely changed my understanding of the proper role of work on the sound system of a language. Instead of teaching learners the sounds and sound patterns in isolation and then working at forcing them to be embedded in the words and structures of the language, it is far better to just quickly introduce the sound features and then only later work with those “pronunciation features” in real language, at first to help learners get a deeper, more embodied sense of the feature, in course-content-context, and then later to use the MTTPs to support memory, expressiveness, emphasis or intelligibility or clarity. (Of course, improved clarity means something is easier to both understand and remember!) Gradually, the instructor and learners together come to possess a powerful set of tools for improved communication and language acquisition.”

-Dr. Bill Acton