Eclectic tonology

ECLECTIC TONOLOGY IN TEACHING
The teacher’s voice has a great influence on the way student’s process oral information and questions. There is also a significant impact on the overall academic performance of the learners under the tutelage of teachers with a refined voice culture. These are teachers who remain vividly etched in our memories and are adored by us in adulthood. This easily explains why majority of teachers who are considered ‘the best’ by students are usually language teachers. And if not, they usually have some unique element in their voice.
Voice has been well utilized by traditional storytellers, distinguished political and spiritual world leaders. This is not forgetting the television and radio commercials. This is where the pace, pitch and volume are used for maximum effect and guaranteed attention. Experienced and successful teachers on the other hand use voice to guarantee continued attention, productive mental processing and academic excellence.
Oral questions provide critical windows of opportunity where the learner’s attention is raised significantly. These windows can also be referred to as teachable moments. This is where, assuming that the teacher has used his/her voice effectively, the input stimulus will override all the other detractors, internal or external to ensure the sustained attention of the student.
In classroom situations, teachers heavily depend on ‘voice’ to trigger and maintain the students’ state of alertness. However, this state of alertness which we will refer to as attention, is only meaningful if the teacher input facilitates the student to not only pay attention but interact with the live input that infers other relevant pieces of information in the memory.(Constructive thinking)
It is easy to understand how verbal information can draw attention if one were to consider how colours impact us visually. It is near impossible to ignore colours like orange, yellow and luminous green because these are supposedly ‘loud ‘ colours. They easily get our visual attention and have a lasting memory residue.
As a teacher, to get students’ attention in a classroom requires great skill, particularly since coercion is discouraged as a means of getting attention of the student. Whereas it may be easy to get the students’ physical attention; it is a daunting task to get the learners’ mental attention.
As opposed to following a conversation in a crowded and noisy environment which we can do with considerable ease; classroom situations provide a unique opportunity where the recipient has most of the external distractors eliminated and the teacher is the most prominent source of stimulus. Even so, the teacher may still not have the full attention of the learner because the teacher’s’ input is competing with internal distractors like day dreaming or stress. It is upon the teacher to have his/her stimulus supercede all the internal detractors or other competing stimuli.
In dichotic listening experiments (Feldman,1994) it was established that when a listener was exposed to two different messages simultaneously in either ear; the listener ended up shadowing one message and ignoring the other. The listener paid most attention to the tonal quality of the message and highest priority given to the sex of the speaker.(Cherry,1953).
The learner’s attention is focused and highest when a question is posed. This question inference spike is immediately followed by a decline in attention as the lesson progresses. The strategy on the part of the teacher is to maintain the level of interest and attention by spiking the lesson from time to time using this ‘curtain hook’ questioning strategy. These spike phases are also the active cognitive windows which provide teachable moments for the teacher and the learner.
The other important aspect is the teachers ability to maintain his/her tone on the tonal plane to ensure sustained attention during the attention dips (AD’s) the tonological value can still maintain the attention at meaningful receptive levels.
Teachers with a well endowed eclectic tonology coupled with a well endowed compendium of pedagogic language schema are well liked by their students and their subjects are usually well performed.
By Sande Olocho

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