Show Me the Logo

A while ago, way back when I was living in Boston, a friend of mine introduced me to the blog of a trainer (applied kinesiology and biomechanics) named Eric Cressey. Of all of the things his research has shown, I have found the things he has written about coaching theory to not only be helpful in exercise, but in my teaching methodology as well

¹Perhaps, over the years, the only thing I've found more useful in figuring out how to deal with high school boys has been the work of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer.

¹.

One of the things that Cressey has written about at length is the value of having effective "Focus Cues" for coaching. That is, when an athlete is preparing to perform (or in the process of performing), what sort of verbal instructions should a coach offer to his/her athlete as either instruction or reminder that would lead to proper execution. Cressey, himself, has suggested various combinations of direct, explicit instruction (“tuck your elbows”) to the more memorably poetic (“imagine your hips are being pulled by a rope”). But recently, while attending a Nick Winkelman training conference in 2013, Cressey had taken note of the importance of creating a distinction between internal and external focus cues.

While internal focus cues orient the body relative to itself--where the elbow is in relation to the body, or how the hips should be positioned relative to the trunk--external focus cues instruct the athlete relative to the space around them. Rather than reminding the lifter to “keep his chest up,” Cressey suggests that, “Show me the logo on your chest,” is a much more effective cue in obtaining the proper posture on a deadlift.

Unsurprisingly, this change in emphasis from internal to external cues has been beneficial in how we approach teaching speech mechanics to our students.


Over the past two years, Kashew and I have been trying to develop our Oral Communication class to be more relevant to the students’ assumed academic needs (both in terms of the international-course and general-course content). But regardless of our expectations of use, pronunciation ability remains a highly rated perceived-need among students and administrators, despite the fact that most ESL students we encounter already speak with a satisfying degree of articulation.

Fortunately, for us, we found in the back of our textbook an extensive

²And useful, which is surprising because these two things are not always mutually inclusive.

² collection of pronunciation assignments that we could easily adapt and supplement. From those basic assignments, we created an outline that would take the students from listening and speaking to writing and speaking, and then to reading and speaking with mechanical instruction (oral first, in terms of hearing and speaking, and then phonetic second, in relation to the reading and writing) as the transition between sections.

Up until recently, most, if not all, of our mechanical cues had been internal: where the tongue needs to be in relation to the palate to create the r versus the l sound, or where in the throat or nose the utterance should originate.

We carried these indiscriminate cues, which had seen palatable success among the high school students, into an intensive color-pronunciation lesson we taught at a couple elementary schools we were assigned to appear at last week.

Our goal was to teach them some basic pronunciation tips for a very specific set of words that they could carry into their continued acquisition of vocabulary, so they do not become trapped in or limited by their understanding and experience of English solely as Katakana-English.

Our cues primarily focused on internal pronunciation mechanics such as the placement of the tongue relative to the r and l of purple and the mechanical use of the lips in the production of the plosive-b in words like blue. However, it was very apparent from the very first lesson that such cues were minimally effective. However, cues such as the “sound of a dog’s growl” in producing the correct r in words like red proved highly effective.

As such, after our initial review, we dramatically shifted our focus from a mechanically heavy, internal-cue-based instruction to external cues like that above, especially cues that could incorporate hand motions for emphasis and would improve retention.

We began teaching the o for orange with a big “O” motion of the arms and then focused more on the popping motion of the lips like the flicking of fingers rather than the placement and timing of the tongue for the b in blue. We used a slow-drawing hand-motion to simulate the location for the production of the softer sounds for purple, and a smiling face to emphasize the long-iː of green.

We saw results almost immediately upon these corrections to the lesson plan.

In 2001, Gabriele Wulf and Wolfgang Prinz argued that external focus cues were more effective than internal focus cues in the improvement of motor-skill performance due to the “Constrained-Action Hypothesis.” This theory suggests that internal focus cues are psychologically constricting because they cause the learner to pay too much attention to the mechanics of his or her performance.

“An internal attentional focus constrains the motor system by interfering with natural control processes,” they argue, "whereas an external focus seems to allow automatic control processes to regulate the movements." Internal cues, it is suggested, affect their change by asking the learner to “stop” one action in favor of another, meaning the learner is more likely to become “frozen” in an attempt to control their movements, as this San Diego State University study (Effects of Attentional Focus on Oral-Motor Control and Learning) exemplifies.

Internal cues, it is hypothesized are akin to asking a subject to "not imagine an elephant," while external cues are more along the lines of instructing the subject to think about a strawberry, instead, to achieve the intended result. This same study finds a half-reduction in the amount of “absolute errors" committed during an Iowa Oral Performance Instrument test between the group instructed using external focus cues versus internal.

Wulf and Prinz go on to find that, "The effectiveness of instructions could be enhanced by manipulating the learner's focus of attention" away from their body to focus on the effects of their movements (649). In fact, "by increasing the distance of the movement effects from the body, the advantages of an external, relative to an internal focus, seemed to be more pronounced," in both result and retention (651). They theorize that an external focus point too spacially close to the body may be psychologically indistinguishable from the body, and therefore indistinguishable as an external focus cue. Much like how beginner drivers are instructed to cast their vision farther down the road in order to drive straighter.

However, observing a coach model the same mechanics (and, potentially even seeing a video of themselves performing the same mechanics) seems to qualify cognitively as an external focus cue by removing the mechanical instruction away from their body as they are more able to clearly see and focus on the effects of the mechanics.

These hypotheses make a lot of sense to me as internal focus cues require an advanced level of body-awareness and discipline, while external cues replace such control and awareness with spacial recognition. I would be interested in seeing whether or not external cues were more- or just-as- effective as internal cues among advanced learners/athletes, or people with much more body-mechanical awareness and control.

It would seem much easier, anecdotally, for an experienced athlete to respond efficiently to simple internal cues such as, “Keep your elbows tucked when you’re under the bar,” because his/her experience set indicates that they would be familiar with the formal image and proper feeling of the technique without getting caught up in processing the individual mechanics.

And then, while much more advanced, when understood in relation to their eventual effect, internal cues lend themselves much more to abstraction and broader application, whereas external cues, themselves, are already metaphorical abstractions of the internal principle and must be tailored to the learner and become constrained by the context.

Regardless, I look forward to testing the effectiveness of making conscious distinctions between the types of cues I use in class and in my own studies.