Use of the Tomatis Effect Electronic Ear in the English Class

Pedagogical report of seventy-one pages, written in September 1977 by Gaston Vanthuyne, José Denuyne and Roger Scheuer, teachers at the Athénée Royal de Comines (Belgium). The authors here report on a school experiment conducted during the 1976-1977 academic year on an entire fifth-year Renovated stream class (thirty-one pupils aged twelve to thirteen, divided into an experimental group of sixteen pupils and a control group of fifteen), in the course of which the learning of English was conducted under the control of the Tomatis Effect Electronic Ear. The report, archived in Alfred Tomatis’s personal papers, attests to the concrete penetration of the Tomatis device into Belgian secondary education and to the methodical application of ethnic pass bands, of the Musical Sonic Return, of Filtered Music at 8,000 Hz, of Filtered English and of Sonic Births to the integration of a foreign language.

Use of the Tomatis Effect Electronic Ear in the framework of the English class of a first year of Belgian secondary education

by Gaston Vanthuyne, José Denuyne and Roger Scheuer

Athénée Royal de Comines, September 1977 — typed pedagogical report, 71 pages.

I. — Genesis of the experiment

Our experiment arose from an observation made in the course of many years of teaching English: the growing gap between the quality of oral expression obtained in secondary education and the level of listening comprehension expected when the pupil is confronted with real English — that of the BBC, of a foreign correspondent, of a film in the original version. This gap, which classical language laboratories managed to fill only with great difficulty, led us to turn to the method developed by Dr Alfred A. Tomatis, which placed audition — and no longer production — at the centre of linguistic learning.

II. — Preliminary observations and commentary

Several Anglo-Saxon authors had already drawn attention to the priority to be granted to listening in the didactics of modern languages: J.W. Fox (Teaching Listening Skills, English Teaching Forum, 1974), T.R. Anderson (Linguistics and the Teaching of Pronunciation, 1970) and R.C. Sittler (Teaching Aural Comprehension, 1975) had notably shown that a group of candidates trained to take down in shorthand radio broadcasts in a foreign language surpassed, in a few months, a group having studied the same language from the beginning by traditional ways. S.W. Calhoun (Studies in Auditory Impressionability) and R.C. Bedford (The Aural-Oral Approach Re-viewed, 1969) nourished the same conviction. These works, joined to the œuvre of Dr Tomatis and notably to Vers l’écoute humaine and to Éducation et dyslexie, founded our approach.

III. — Objectives

To verify, on an entire class, to what extent the passage under the Electronic Ear modifies:

the auditory selectivity and auditory laterality of pupils;
the perception and production of English sibilants (s, z, ʃ, ʒ, θ, ð, f, v) — phonemes foreign to the French mother tongue of the pupils;
the immediate auditory memory and verbal rhythm;
the global quality of oral expression in English (intonation, rhythm, hyper-diphthongisation, aspiration of stops, maintenance of final consonants, reduction of unaccented vowels);
the general attitude of listening, concentration and rapidity of integration of lexical and syntactic structures.

IV. — Experiment

A. Phases — 1. Testing

All pupils of the fifth-year Renovated stream were submitted, in September 1976, to a complete examination: tonal audiometer from 125 to 8,000 Hz for both ears separately, selectivity test, search for the dominant ear, T.C. Esseo (concentration trial), G. Bastin test of verbal structuring, dotting trial, Stambak rhythm trial (twenty-one rhythmed sequences, scored on fifteen or sixteen points), Picture-words trial on one hundred and thirty logatoms.

2. Constitution of the groups

On the basis of the results of this testing, the class was divided into two balanced groups:

an Experimental Group (EG) of sixteen pupils, who would follow the English teaching under the Electronic Ear;
a Control Group (CG) of fifteen pupils, who would follow the traditional teaching.

3. Programming

The programming was spread over the entire academic year, at the rate of daily sessions for the EG and according to the normal schedule for the CG, all the trials being repeated in June 1977.

B. The Electronic Ear

The Electronic Ear conditions audition by an electronic gating which alternately solicits the muscle of the malleus (innervated by the fifth cranial pair — trigeminal nerve) and the muscle of the stapes (innervated by the seventh pair). Channel A (habitual audition A→E→G) gives way, beyond a threshold of intensity, to channel A2 — from which emerges the new manner of hearing A2→E2→G2 proper to the target language. For the osteopathic description of the middle ear, see Vers l’Écoute Humaine volume I, chapter II, pp. 162-164.

C. Filtered music at 8,000 Hz (FM)

In accordance with the works of Paul Madaule on the action of filtered music upon the basilar membrane — cortical recharge, global perception, reconstitution of the body image, liberation of creativity — FM at 8,000 Hz constitutes, in our experiment, the passive reference phase. The progressive filterings 500-8,000 Hz bring the ear to allow itself to be carried by the high harmonics, sometimes experienced as painful in the first sessions.

D. The English sibilants

Thirteen pupils of the EG initially presented a selectivity open from 125 to 3,000 Hz. Now the English sibilants are found in the 500-2,000 Hz band, while the characteristic pass band of the English listener extends from 2,000 to 15,000 Hz. The electronic gating then simultaneously solicits the muscle of the malleus (5^th pair) and that of the stapes (7^th pair), allowing the pupil to perceive and reproduce the phonemes s, z, ʃ, ʒ, θ, ð, f, v under the phonological conditions proper to English (cf. Annex III).

E. Observations and commentary

1. Listening test

The audiograms of June 1977 brought out a clear opening of selectivity in the EG — particularly at the frequencies 3,000, 4,000 and 6,000 Hz — whereas no significant improvement was observed in the CG, whose selectivity remained limited to the 125-3,000 Hz band for the majority of subjects.

2. Evolution of selectivity

Out of the sixteen pupils of the EG, fourteen presented in September 1976 at least one defect of selectivity; there remained only seven in June 1977 — a gain of 43.75%. The CG counted eleven selectively deficient pupils in September 1976 and still eleven in June 1977 — zero gain.

3. MSR, FM, EF, SBM, SBE, NFM, Gregorian

The passive phase comprised Musical Sonic Return (MSR), long (thirty minutes) or short (five minutes); Filtered Music at 8,000 Hz (FM) in sessions of forty-five minutes accompanied by manual occupation, film projections and Picture-words. From December on, Filtered English (EF) at 5,000 Hz was interspersed, after fifteen hours of preliminary FM, in alternations of thirty minutes of FM followed by fifteen minutes of EF. The active phase comprised Musical Sonic Births (SBM) and English (SBE), long or short, supplemented by a gymnastics of high sounds and the playing of Gregorian chant. Some pupils experienced the first FM sessions as painful — a known transitory reaction which fades over the course of the cure.

4. English sibilants and neuronal implications

The auriculo-temporal nerve, a branch of the 5^th pair, commands at once the lower jaw and the tension of the tympanum; the 7^th cranial pair innervates the muscle of the stapes; the XI^th pair (spinal accessory nerve) regulates the cervical musculature and participates in the listening posture; the X^th pair (glossopharyngeal nerve) intervenes in laryngeal monitoring. The listening posture defined by Tomatis is radically opposed to the “nonchalance of pupils in the language laboratory” of the classical kind, and conditions by itself the quality of the phonetic conditioning to come.

Extra-linguistic effects observed in the course of work on the sibilants: prolonged concentration for forty-five minutes without apparent fatigue — a working time that the pupils would formerly have refused categorically —, an attitude “open” to foreign phonology rather than “analytico-synthetic”, massive affective reinvestment in the learning.

5. Immediate auditory memory

The immediate memory trial on sequences of five to six non-grammatical syllables — illuminated by the research of E. Marks, G.E. Müller and W. Epstein — confirmed that the capacity of apprehension remains limited to five syllables, that beyond, the stimulus partially deactivates attention, and that a sequence of six syllables can be restituted only if the pupil possesses a fully constituted phonological sieve. Work under EE, by constructing this sieve, mechanically prolongs the span of useful memory.

6. Evolution of rhythm

The Stambak rhythm trial (twenty-one sequences) confirms a clear superiority of the EG: average total passed from 82.59 to 94.20 (+11.61), against a gain of only 3.89 in the CG (86.06 → 89.97). Rhythm constitutes, in conformity with Paul Chauchard’s views, a primitive cortical phenomenon of articulatory and muscular nature, accessible to neurological conditioning.

7. Picture-words

The one hundred and thirty picture-words drawn from L.A. Hill’s Picture Vocabulary, classified according to their syllabic structure (326 monosyllabic, 231 disyllabic, 99 polysyllabic, and their combinations), were recorded at 19 cm/s direct from an English female speaker at the Centre du Langage in Paris. Their repetition, integrated into the English cure, showed that these logatoms no longer raised any problem of phonological discrimination in the pupils prepared by FM — a manifest result to be set against the unerasable difficulty they still represented for the CG.

8. The English class

The work pace of the EG proved one and a half times faster than that of the CG. The memorisation of texts, their integration into exercises of paradigmatic then syntagmatic manipulation, the passage to the sketch as preferred mode of expression — all this attested to a lively and continuous interest, which did not flag throughout the academic year. The phonetic mimicry between pupils of the same booth, or between neighbouring booths, was clear by February and confirmed the sonic and global nature of the phonological contagion sought.

9. The experimental group after the summer holidays

At the start of the 1977 academic year, the inventory of what remained acquired in the pupils of the EG — at the level of phonetic correctness, the memorisation of texts and the use of the basic structures — brought out a retention higher than the usual norms: three weeks of warming up sufficed to restore the ease acquired in June, whereas the CG, submitted to the equivalent test, remained at the same starting point.

Conclusion

If the report you have just read seems at first sight to distance us from the traditional path followed by the majority of language teachers, it must be admitted that our approach aimed to allow the greatest possible number of children to overcome the physical handicaps that constitute so many insurmountable obstacles to the study of a language: errors of spatialisation, disturbed selectivity, poorly marked auditory laterality — so many factors which betray a poor listening, itself responsible, in our view, for the defect of intuitive knowledge of the mother tongue and, thereby, of the impossibility of integrating a foreign language.

These handicaps seem to be correctable to a large extent: our pupils, in their majority, approached the new language without difficulty of phonetic origin, and the establishment in them of new audio-vocal habits induced the prosodic traits of the target language — the unconscious support indispensable for all later appropriation.

Certain new hypotheses were elaborated in the course of the experimentation, notably those of hyper-diphthongisation and of immediate auditory memory. The programming may doubtless still know numerous improvements to reduce the time devoted to phonological conditioning alone — which is never more than the first stage of the learning of a foreign language.

The points which matter most to us in the continuation of this experiment are the following:

the persistence of the new phonological sieve and, in consequence, of the rhythm and intonation of the target language, in the years to come;
the individualisation of the programming under the Electronic Ear, in order to better adjust the cure to each child in particular, at the beginning and during the conditioning to the foreign language.

If the first point can be attained, important consequences will flow from it as to the fundamental role that must be played, from the earliest age, by the education of rhythm and intonation, of laterality, of knowledge of the species. It will then be recognised that an education of listening, such as it was defined by A.A. Tomatis, must necessarily precede every learning of a modern language — including the mother tongue.

As for the second point, its application will depend on the conditions under which we shall be able to continue the experiment, but also on the manner in which we shall know how to sanitise, adapt and use techniques that demand from their users a fundamental re-examination. Is not progress at this price?

Gaston Vanthuyne, José Denuyne, Roger Scheuer
Athénée Royal de Comines
September 1977

Annex I — Equipment used

The installation is situated in a room of 8 m × 6 m and comprises:

four Electronic Ears, sixteen earphones, four microphones (APP equipment);
four tape recorders;
four booths of four pupils each, arranged in such a way that each pupil could see the screen projections under good conditions;
sixteen potentiometers allowing each pupil to choose his listening volume (APP equipment);
sixteen “Balance” circuits, commanded by a ten-position knob, allowing a progressive and individual lateralisation (APP equipment);
sixteen stools arranged in a circle for oral exercises “outside O.E.” (sketches, reading, etc.);
a projector for fixed images, a screen, a blackboard;
a derivation box allowing the diffusion either of one common programme, or of two, three or four different programmes;
two ZA-113 A audiometers equipped with a speech module.

Sonic material: short MSR (APP); five tapes of FM at 8,000 Hz (APP); one tape of English filtered at 8,000 Hz (APP); one tape of English SB (APP); a series of English sibilants 500-8,000 Hz (APP); three tapes of Picture-words (APP); an audio-visual English course First Things First by L.G. Alexander (Longman); a Fournier List tape for vocal audiometry.

Annexes III and IV

Annex III details the English sibilant exercises constructed from minimal pairs and exercise sentences (from faceless expressions to Silly Sarah Swallow). Annex IV reproduces the Picture-words used (An inkpot, an inkstain, a mirror, a hairbrush…) as well as the room plan of the installation.

Selective bibliography

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Source: Vanthuyne G., Denuyne J., Scheuer R., “Utilisation de l’Oreille Électronique à Effet Tomatis dans le cadre du cours d’anglais d’une première année de l’enseignement secondaire belge”, typed pedagogical report of 71 pages, Athénée Royal de Comines, September 1977. Digitised document from Alfred Tomatis’s personal archives.